Riet Wijnen – Conversation Six: Double-Lines
Tue, Sep 17, 2019, 7–9pm
Riet Wijnen’s Conversation Six: Double-Lines is a fictional dialogue centered around British Constructivist Marlow Moss (1889—1958) and Australian artist and pioneer of modernist painting Grace Crowley (1890—1979), featuring a third character, Pauline Oliveros (1932—2016), the American experimental composer, pioneer of electronic music, and humanitarian.
Moss and Crowley speak in short monologues about important personal and professional relationships they have maintained throughout their lives. The conversation is divided into subsections with titles such as “Lovers,” “Mentor,” “Sibling,” “Commercial Gallery,” “Male Companion,” and “Gender”. They not only tell their own life stories through these monologues, but after some time the monologues start to speak to each other as well, as similarities between the two lives become clear: the journals Moss and Crowley both contributed to, the places and schools they visited, but also their unconventional feminist perspectives on the world, and their struggles with their middle class families and the art world.
Oliveros provides two compositions from the series Sonic Meditations, which she once called “recipes for listening,” developed at the time the women’s liberation movement was emerging. These compositions function within the fictional conversation as structural memos on the notion of listening within the practice of speaking.
Focusing on the lives of key female figures, Conversation Six: Double-Lines antagonizes how abstraction as an art movement, starting in the 1920s, is canonized in western art history. Conversation Six: Double-Lines, is part of Wijnen’s larger Sixteen Conversations on Abstraction, a cycle of text-based and sculptural works initiated in 2015.
SculptureCenter’s presentation of Conversation Six: Double-Lines will be read by Riet Wijnen and Rindon Johnson, both included in Searching the Sky for Rain.
This program is free and open to the public but RSVP is required.
Sponsors
Searching the Sky for Rain is made possible with financial support from the Mondriaan Fund, the public cultural funding organization focusing on visual arts and cultural heritage. Additional support is provided as part of the Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York.
Lead underwriting support of SculptureCenter’s Exhibition Fund has been generously provided by the Kraus Family Foundation with additional support by Toby Devan Lewis.
SculptureCenter’s programs and operating support is provided by the Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation; public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; the National Endowment for the Arts; Danielle and Drew Anderman; Andreas Beroutsos and Abigail Hirschhorn; Carol Bove and Gordon Terry; Irene and Allen Brill; Laren C. and Jesse M. Brill; Lee and Robert K. Elliott; Elizabeth and Adrian Ellis; Fred Wilson; the A. Woodner Fund; New York City Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer; and contributions from our Board of Trustees and Director’s Circle. Additional funding is provided by the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation and contributions from many generous individuals.