Pop Druid

Artist and Filmmaker David Dixon’s recent work will be on view at Antenna Gallery for
one month, opening on Saturday March 14th at 7:00 PM. The exhibition, Pop Druid,
includes a feature film and an eclectic mix of painting, sculpture, video, and photography.
The gallery work tacitly critiques the received artistic traditions of pop, minimalism,
expressionism and conceptualism while exploring a range of subjects from Jackson
Pollock’s grave, to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, to the ancient art of rock stacking, to
Pop Tarts. These elements trace a circuitous through-line that indirectly, and sometimes
directly, relates to the film, titled Unloosened and Root. The film is both documentary
and narrative fiction, and alternates between scenes shot in pre-Katrina New Orleans
during Mardi Gras and a haunted campground in upstate New York. It is an elegiac film
that eulogizes the death of the artist’s mother, not by telling her particular story, but by
enlarging her death through allegory. This is done partially by focusing on the unusual
funerary ceremony conceived by New Orleans’s own Robin Drake who died of cancer at
the tragically early age of 32. She too was a mother, and Dixon documents as her family
and friends execute her final wishes, creating an uncanny artistic collaboration between
the living and the dead. Premiered at MoMA in 2005, this will be the first public
screening in New Orleans: Antenna Gallery, Sunday March 15th at 7:30 PM.
David Dixon grew up in North Carolina, but has been living and working in New York
City since 1989. In those years he has exhibited, performed and/or screened his work in
many venues including The Kitchen, Saint Marks Church, Galapagos, Monkey Town,
Barbés, Momenta Arts, Postmasters and the Museum of Modern Art. He is currently
enrolled at Cornell University as an MFA candidate.