March 13 - April 12, 2009
opening reception Friday March 13, 6 - 9pm
-more info-Carpet Death is a typology of fourteen deaths enacted by the main characters from the emblematic American television show Dallas.

Each death is a variation on the final frame of a season: the frozen still of Bobby's fallen torso. Viewing the gentle pulse beneath the still frame, we sense the actor beneath the corpse, miming death, betraying life. This image is a tender lamentation signaling the anxious wait for the next season and with it, resurrection. The familiar pose inevitably evokes a devotional theme: a posthumously idealized body, a death pinup.

This element of christian iconography is widely used in Western painting, from depictions of the Deposition of Christ to David's The Death of Marat. The idealized dead continues to play a central role in fine art and commercial realms. Whether it's the shower scene from Psycho or an advertisement for L'Oreal, the sensuality of a beautiful breathing corpse is effectively put to work.

Synthesized for our parents, the Ewings are 1980's desire personified. The show lives now as a series of archetypes faintly burnt into the TV screen of the collective unconscious. Many elements are still timely; as a petroleum-powered family saga, Dallas provides an absurdist appreciation of the internal motivations behind America's political dynasties.

By inhabiting the show and employing the image of a fallen torso as a window into a recently past popular culture, we search for insight into the mechanism of desire. In the idealized deaths of the Ewings, we suffer controlled loss, we witness and participate in an endless repetition of a seasonal death cycle. In this camp investigation we find death without decay. Over and over the figure falls to the carpet, pressing an imprint.

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