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The Way that Words Can Hurt:
Dan Pillers' (dis)-EASE
by Samuel Topiary
San Francisco Bay Times
The small live/work Bewegung
Art, Design & Performance gallery is currently exhibiting
(dis)-EASE, a one-man show by local artist Dan Pillers. A recent BFA
grad from SFAI, Dan Pillers has been creating work about the ubiquity
of AIDS and the experience of spending a year helping his lover die.
With eerie humor of a survivor, Pillers' is the work of an angry fag
whose cynical wit is a small fort of strength. As the title of the
show - (dis)-Ease - suggests, the exhibit is a confrontational
testimony of the artist's life, designed to fill viewers with
uncomfortable images and metaphors the reality of being a
30-something gay man in the midst of the plague.
The installation is a small
room full of Pillers' relic-like testaments to the AIDS-ravaged
landscape. The most arresting piece in the gallery is
"Family," a group of ten life-size stuffed figures. The
muslin dolls, stained with coffee and tea, mottled and misshapen,
hang from the ceiling in a lifeless group: They are a dirge to the
growing numbers of Pillers' family of friends that have died.
"Innocence Lost" is a pile of miniatures of these same
stuffed figures, each with a small red button sewn on as a heart.
Across one wall are a series
of performative pieces, sick jokes; revelatory in the way they mix
childhood rhymes with grim reality. "Bash Back" is a
beautifully wrought wood box lined with blue velvet and holding a
baseball bat, which comes in two parts and screws together.
"Widow's Box" is a see-through box made of black lace, tied
with a black ribbon, containing a black veil with a red ribbon.
"Broken Bones" consists of three small white drawstring
bags, like the sort kids use to keep marbles or jacks, each printed
with one of the words: "sticks," "stones,"
"bones," to describe what each bag contains.
Pillers, who is a long-time
collector of animal bones, uses bones in much of his work. The piece
"Words Can Sting Like Everything" is a finely wrought wood
box displaying bones on the top and a large bundle of sticks underneath.
"Faggot" is a
life-size bundle of branches tied together. An interactive
performance, "Post for the Blinded," is a tall, smoothly
sanded and finished post with raised Braille letters carved into the
top. There is a Braille alphabet guide next to the post so that
viewers experience the piece's built-in revelation, an illusion to,
among other things, the Spanish Inquisition when deaf and blind
people were burned at the stake along with the queers and other undesirables.
Playing with words, double
meanings, and descriptive names of objects, Pillers illustrates the
power that words have, the ways that objects and names can combine to
perform ideas. Such is also the case with "I Am Position,"
a small wooden pedestal holding simple printed white business cards
carrying that phrase. "Rarely can an object say what it means on
its own," Pillers told me in a recent interview while installing
the exhibit.
"Dear Friends" is a
poem he wrote, printed in white letters on the white gallery wall, to
his family of dead friends. Also exhibited is a color-xeroxed book,
"Remember, Listen, Scream," which contains poems,
recollections and computer-altered personal photographs of his
friends, the figures of the ones who have died blacked out. "A
Dozen Red Roses" is a vertically arranged diptych, two beautiful
wooden frames, the top one containing 12 dried rose flowers sealed
inside, and the bottom frame filled with the clipped stems.
(dis)Ease will be on exhibit
through Sept. 23 at Bewegung Art, Design & Performance, located
at 427 South Van Ness in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Gallery hours are Friday, Saturday, Sunday, & Monday from 1 - 4
PM. For more information, call (415) 703-0554
Samuel Topiary, “The Way that Words
Can Hurt: Dan Pillers’ (dis)EASE”, SAN FRANCISCO BAY TIMES,
Vol.16 #25 9/7/95 p.27 |
