Dana Buzzee | Incidental Omens

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Dana Buzzee, “Ripple,” 2024

single-channel video (courtesy of the artist)

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 12 from 7 to 9 p.m.

Incidental Omens envisions the invigorating possibilities of fantasy, altered states, and communal experience. Dana Buzzee draws from places of concentrated physical and psychological transformation such as: bathhouses, spas, dance clubs, and dungeons. Her installation of plastic harness strap-work, chains, tiled surfaces, and virtual water features, creates an ethereal and inclusive space for re-imagining utopian architectural spaces of healing, communing, and escapism.

Hanging from the ceiling of the gallery, otherworldly-scaled body harnesses and mystical acrylic sigils crafted from PVCs and acrylics contain unthinkable scales of time and biology. Beginning as organic matter of algae and animals from millions of years ago and refined through petrochemical processes, these plastics contain an apocalypse. Within the polymer harnesses and sigils, sexual desire and obsession converge with capitalistic longing and consumer fetishism.

These plastic works are shaped in ways that might contain or restrict the body, but plastics continue to alter our interior biology as well. Microplastics permeate the air we breathe and the blood in our veins, affecting, among other things, reproductive health. Future inheritors of the planet are becoming increasingly hybrid beings that exist beyond the dichotomies of organic and inorganic. In fact, it might even be more appropriate to think of Buzzee’s sculptures as bodies themselves. Their transparent, spectral forms are ghosts of the bodies that formed them as they hang waiting to be reanimated through the plastic bodies of the future.

Incidental Omens proposes a space beyond physical and psychological restraints. Buzzee describes the exhibition as if it was assembled far into the future by a retro-revivlaist cult, trying to make sense of the detritus and ancient plastics left over from our current age. Among the harness sculptures are laser-cut “sigils” and hand tool-like “implements” with tendrils that reach out, ready to be activated as part of a summoning ritual. This magic is needed to imagine the new spaces of the future. Extrapolating from current day spaces of bathouses or hot springs, Buzzee speculates on future spaces outside of productivity and efficiency. These are places of communing and healing where all are invited to partake in the rituals of a future utopia.