Williamson Gallery

January 28 - March 24, 1996

Dagmar Demming, who lives alternately in Berlin and L.A., studied at the Art School of Graphics and Design, in Leipzig, and earned an MFA degree at the Hochschule der Kunste of Berlin. She applied for and received permission to leave East Berlin in 1982. Her work has appeared in group shows in Germany, Sweden, Norway, and the eastern U.S., and in two recent solo exhibitions in Berlin and New York. In 1994 she was included in group shows at Cal State L.A., and Mark Moore Gallery.

Demming's installations include the element of sound, as in the project called Listening from 3 to 4, which she completed earlier this year in New York and Los Angeles. Listening from 3 to 4 considered the notion of time as something that does or does not have identity. The artist recorded sounds daily for one month at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and Grand Street in New York between the hours of 3 and 4 pm, and replayed them each the next day in the adjoining Sudvik-Villano Gallery. A similar recording was made in Los Angeles and mixed onto a compact disk, thus reconfiguring a heretofore unexamined sense of time and place.

In her Williamson Gallery installation, Demming uses the perimeter of the gallery for a piece titled The Erotic Language of Tao, which names 18 sexual positions using Taoist phrases that refer to animals. In the main gallery, Basic Noise: Mom and Dad in Recent American Voices broadcasts over 40 speakers the words various individuals use for "mother" and "father."