Dennis Balk at Inova
A second show at Inova fills the gallery’s spacious main hall with photos, posters, scientific diagrams, theater props and other artworks by Dennis Balk, the well-traveled playwright and graphic designer. Titled "Dennis Balk: Early Work 1890-2090," the exhibition clearly takes a tongue-in-cheek attitude towards the vaunting artistic ego.The show presents Balk as something of a mad scientist, featuring an assortment of graphic readouts, what looks like a homemade "magnetic receiver," frenetic drawings on napkins and compulsively hand-written historical timelines. It also boasts theatrical props like stage steps and trash cans, plus plenty of photographs, including a large picture of Ho Chi Minh.
On one wall is a grid of 36 framed photos titledParticles+waves with plausibility (2003), which intersperses documentary images of men in urban Egypt with colorful close-ups of subatomic particles, coral-like abstractions, computer-generated video game iconography, topology, spices and images of ancient ruins. As outrageous as it may sound, Balk seems to be suggesting an extraterrestrial component in Middle Eastern genetics. In Balk’s universe, we are amateur journalists trying to complete his puzzle and he triumphs in creating the sense of logic, if not meaning.
American Indian Movement 2090 (1995) is the most complex piece in the exhibition. On a traditional white pedestal lays a small white box, opened and slightly burned on one side-- no content is visible inside. Stenciled on the top of the box is an image of an unidentified Indigenous American and the logotype: “AIM 2090.” Just as the title describes, AIM stands for the radical American Indian Movement that originated in Minnesota in the late Sixties. However, why is the equation numeral “2090” so prominent? One could infer the number points to studies that predict the American Indigenous population will rise close of 4 million by 2020, the most in decades. According to the Census Bureau by 2050 non-Hispanic whites will constitute just barely over half of the population, leading the Hispanic community to be the biggest minority in the US and to a “White” America decline. Could this be a precarious tale of ethnic vengeance?
Another bit of information lead me to a caricature of Ward LeRoy Churchill (b.1947), who has been publicly accused by AIM of being an undercover Federal informant in the Seventies. In the caricature (dated and signed in 2005 by Marty Two Bulls) Churchill's head has been inserted to the body of a chicken and he is browsing paraphernalia from a kit (a white box) identified as: “Real Injun Kit 70's radical model.” Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies and author focusing on the treatment of political dissenters the University of Colorado since 1990, made news recently when a court reinstated him to his duties after being unlawfully fired, apparently, for making harsh racial remarks in an essay about the 911 attacks. Even without the full account, or understanding of regional intricacies and politics altered by propaganda, Balk creates a structure that is as maligned and erroneous as the yellow press.
