World View
Subtitle: The G7 Suite
Publisher: Eye Level Gallery
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Halifax, Canada
Language: eng
Format: Exhibition Flyer
Number of pages: 4
Description: Catalogue flyer for the exhibition World View - The G7 Suite by Peter Dykhuis at Eye Level Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, May 23 - June 22nd 1995. Curatorial essay by Moritz Gaede.
Table of contents: title: With the G7 summit happening here in town from June 15th to June 17th, Halifax is dreaming the expensive dream of being the centre of the world for a few days. A massive facelift operation has been under way for a year now, and only those streets and vistas that will be graced by the touch of the world leaders shoes or seen from their limousine windows are being ripped out and replaced, rebuilt and renovated. The Halifax of the official photos and videoclips will be a shiny new security zone, like the manicured landscapes along the official travel routes through the former Soviet Union.; title: In Peter Dykhuis' exhibition we find 8 world maps, each one by one of the G7 countries. Canada has two - a french and an english version of the same map. Each map is displayed behind plexiglass doors, on which the publishing nation's flag is painted in encaustic, allowing the world map to be faintly glimpsed through the map. Seeing them all side by side, the differences between maps are striking. Aspects of their design and choice of color seem to embody national stereotypes - the Japanese map looking understated, with light, cool colors, while the Italian map is bold and funky, with wildly curvaceous lettering. Each of these economic superpowers locates itself towards the centre of the world, and relegates the rest of the world more or less to the margins.; title: In the departments of Philosophy and Religion of the Protestant parochial school Peter Dykhuis attended during the mid-seventies, the term "world view" was a heavily-used piece of rhetoric. In classes on Western history, where the binary dialectics of body and mind, church and state, romanticism and classicism were deconstructed to yield a more unified perspective, Dykhuis was educated to see the "world view" as the big concept that provides one with the philosophical and intellectual tools which define how one "reads" the world. This loaded piece of rhetoric stayed with him, and it seemed particularly pointed to use it in a flip, punning way, as Dykhuis did in the original "World View", a single piece exhibited in Eye Level Gallery's 1992 members show. In this piece, he masked off an etire map of the world, leaving only the worlds "world view" to expose the commercially published map beneath. The words were centered on the map, and the area they exposed was Kansas. It seemed ironic that kansas should be the centre of the world, until Dykhuis realized that this was an American-made map, and that he, trusting in the objectivity of the cartographers, had assumed it would be a neutral depiction of the physical world. This soon led to the purchase of other world maps, each one representing a world view of its nation of origin. In each of these maps, the location of the centre is different, and in each one, it strategically foregrounds the importance of the publishing country.; title: The series refers quite deliberately to jasper Johns' Flag paintings of the 1950's in its use of encaustic, and in the way the flags cover the world maps when the plexiglass doors are closed (Jasper Johns buried barely visible scraps of newspaper under his flag paintings). It also seems an apt deconstruction of Postmodern terminology, much of which is geographic (mapping territories, borders, frameworks, gaps) and derives from the descriptions of the privileged explorers, discoverers and travellers of the modern era.; title: As the use of encaustic deconstructs the process of painting by making texture and brushstroke transparent, the painted flags themselves are deconstructed in the work. When the doors of each piece are opened, the icons of the flags are broken, and one can see their backsides. What becomes visible then are the world maps, each of which embodies the perspective of a particular collective.; title: Moritz Gaede, Halifax, 1995