Dennis Hollingsworth

Near Dark

Here is the statement for the show Neal Rock is curating at the Donna Beam gallery in Las Vegas:

Curated By Neal Rock. Show runs Friday January 19 - Tuesday February 12th
Text by David Edward.
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Near Dark
Caroline Castano Gordon Cheung Peter Lamb Stephen Hendee
Pearl C. Hsiung Dennis Hollingsworth Neal Rock
January 19th ? February 9th 2007
In 1987 rookie film director Kathryn Bigelow completed ?Near Dark?, exploring her interest in portraying contemporary, identifiable heroines within the bravura of ?masculine? film genres. Using much of the main cast (bar Sigourney Weaver) from James Cameron?s Aliens, the film was released only to be engulfed by teen phenomenon, The Lost Boys.

It was, to all extents and purposes, a film resigned to the video market. Relegated to those dusty back shelves and discovered by accident when finally running out of options on a Saturday night rental.
With Aliens? cinematographer (Adam Greenberg) to boot, the project was indeed a Frankenstein?s patchwork of other filmic talent. But later, the Gothic Western found its audience, fragmented and dispersed across the US, in those very back rooms on the edge of boredom and in search of something.

The objects in this exhibition structurally echo the journey of this film, in its search for an audience and within the characters of the narrative. They invoke a mixing of genres and subject dialogues and appear to us darkly, at a side glance, in a space permitted within an afterthought. Although some might appear comfortable as a recognizable way of making that much loved and hated thing called art, on closer inspection no one here is ok with things.

At the Donna Beam gallery in Las Vegas, these artists are still stuck in the middle of somewhere, trying to figure it out? a way to be, in the skin of something that doesn?t quite fit but has to somehow, there?s little choice.

In these ?worlds? any narrative is handled with trembling hands? it is as the west coast artist Allan Kaprow stated somewhat prophetically in 1974 ?Today there are countless artists and reproductions, countless gods and cosmologies. When ?the one? is replaced by ?the many?, reality may be perceived as a menu of illusions, transformable and replenishable according to need?. When the many is replaced by the indivisible even, does it matter where the dust falls at all?

David Edward. London 2007