Date the Time

Due to the process-based nature of the Session program, this project will undergo constant modifications; the features of this page provide accruing information on the project’s developments.

On August 17, 2012 Molly Dilworth will begin work on Date the Time, as part of Recess’s signature program, Session. Session invites artists to use Recess’s public space as studio, exhibition venue and grounds for experimentation. For Date the Time, Dilworth will create a series of banners and flags, bearing patterns generated from user-submitted photos. Addressing digital content using traditional folk art techniques, Dilworth will distill issues of labor and consumer rights from unexpected sources.

The flags and banners will be displayed throughout the space in the visual register of corporate and national signage. As Dilworth completes more flags, the volume of images will expand into a dense maze. The user-generated source material will be displayed in a grid, alongside an accompanying library on the ethics of modern and historic labor. This coupling of image and information invites discussion of online data protection, as well as the habitual obscuring of consumer and corporate rights.

Using tropes from Wassily Kandinsky, who employed folk traditions to generate new forms of abstraction, and Mary Heilmann, who renders everyday snapshots as unmoored fields of color, Dilworth’s flags will become a collage of our culture’s increasingly abstracted relationship to our own tasks and assignments, and the resulting estrangement from the fruits of our labor. The growing sea of banners will represent proliferating cultural and corporate nation-states that control the information that individual citizens labor to produce. As a result, Dilworth’s working installation will question our contemporary sense of cultural belonging and access to information held by governing bodies.

Session invites artists to use Recess’s public platform to combine productive studio space with dynamic exhibition opportunities. Sessions remain open to the public from the first day of the artist’s project through the last, encouraging sustained dialogue between artists and audiences. Due to the process-based nature of Session, projects undergo constant revision and the above proposal is subject to change.