Pierre Huyghe: Streamside Day Follies
October 31, 2003–January 11, 2004, Dia Chelsea
Overview
In Streamside Day Follies Pierre Huyghe explores the formative role of ideological and semiotic systems in establishing social rituals and traditions. Huyghe’s exhibition at Dia included five murals, concealed behind five supplementary walls, which were revealed when the walls began to slowly move through the gallery to configure a pavilion in which a short fiction film is projected. When the film ended, the walls would retract to their original positions along the perimeter of the space, restoring the gallery to its pristine condition. After opening with scenes from an Edenic landscape, Streamside Day Follies traces the formation of a burgeoning community hypothetically located in the Hudson Valley. A young family is seen relocating to the new housing development. The first of two sections limns a mythic kernel that is then instantiated in scenes from a typical inaugural celebration devised to forge communal identity. Orchestrated by the artist for the nascent residential development that served as the prototype for his fictional construct, the celebration boasted a costume parade, a feast, music, and other activities. Huyghe’s multifaceted project employs a diverse range of cultural representations garnered from a myriad of references including nineteenth-century utopian social projects, Hollywood films, Disney animation, contemporary fiction writing, and romantic landscape painting.
This exhibition is sponsored by Dior Homme. Additional support is provided by Étant donnés and Marian Goodman Gallery, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.
Artist
Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe was born in Paris in 1962, where he currently lives and works.