DANA BELL | From Binoculars...2024

My work explores an encyclopedic array of human activity and gesture through photography and pictures that guide my image making. I recreate the imagery of vernacular photographs sourced from eBay (mostly in screenshot form, but a few purchased) that document body language, with a focus on hands as a means of expression. I remove the figures’ faces, opening up narrative possibilities and inviting viewers to question the means by which stories are told. I erase the backgrounds to clarify the significance of the figures' gestures, leaving only a stark backdrop, a palimpsest and a negative space that becomes another character, a beckoning between presence and absence. My works are also inspired by single-panel cartoons. Yet while most cartoons require a caption to complete their meaning, I have typically chosen to eliminate the caption, creating another opportunity for viewers to infer their own narratives. This is my first proposal to include both tile and source material alongside my works.

The color relationships also add significance: the cooler and warmer tones offer play between the action, mood, and time of day, and are a nod to color-field painting. The stark contrasts between hues suggest a filter between the original photograph and the resulting artwork. In my embossed one-color prints, another type of filter is suggested, like one you might find in a dream state, manifested as a raised outline with recessed bodies which might also be read as surface disruption.

The surface of my works disguise the artist’s hand, commenting on the ephemeral nature of digital image production and the reproducibility of the image. The images I choose have vantage-points that describe recognizable gestures and body language that relate to contemporary socio-political issues like climate change, patriarchy, and post-colonialism. For instance, in my recent series on tourists, the destructive attributes of post-colonialism are at the forefront. These works often show binoculars pointing at popular sights. The tourists’ presence and gaze disrupts the lives of the locals. The emptiness around the figures suggests that post-colonial ecological and social damage has left behind innumerable scars. The story told by the painting of a photograph neutralizes photography’s documentary claims. If the photograph is a document, as described by Ramana Javitz, the Curator of the Picture Collection from 1924-1968, my work flattens the document in a cartoon-like manner, placing these images in a more accessible and universal context.

For this series “From Hello,” I am using the NYPL Picture Collection’s folders as research material. Since eBay’s beginning in the late nineties, I have searched for figurative material and signal-related poses to use as a basis for my artwork. As my research has evolved, I have found that the naming of photographs (often of unknown origin) are frequently categorized with insensitive terms that devalue and belittle the images. Breaking with my past practice of avoiding captioning, the artworks that result from this project will be titled with captions found in the archives of the Picture Collection that call attention to the language used to describe their source material.

I have taken these results from these archival sources and recreated them into drawings using Adobe Illustrator, and then photographs that will be hung together alongside prints of their source material. The archival material will be placed alongside the artworks as well as the text from which the title was drawn.

BIO

Dana Bell was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1974. She received her BFA from Wayne State University and MFA from Maine College of Art in 2004. Her works span from choreography to mixed media collage, to painting, printmaking and handmade paper, including her most recent inclusion of archival materials, which double as her source material. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and was awarded the 2013 NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) fellowship in Choreography, Gregory Millard Fellow, the 2012  Change, Inc award, and NYC Artist's Fellowship. She recently was awarded a residency at the Pace House in Stonington, Maine, ans a Maker residency at Fat Cat Fab Lab in addition to a Manhattan Graphics Center scholarship, and is a 2023 Print Club of New York honoree.