Duke Riley: Welcome Back to Wasteland Fishing
September 12-October 17, 2020
Opening Reception: September 12, 6-9pm
Gallery Hours: Saturdays and Sundays 12-6pm
All visitors to the opening reception must register for a time slot here. Visitors will be admitted in small groups to adhere to social distancing and safety guidelines.
Open Source Gallery presents Welcome Back to Wasteland Fishing, a multimedia exhibition by Duke Riley.
Two thousand years ago, a creative fisherman tied a fish shaped bone to a bronze hook, effectively inventing the fishing lure. It was an anthropological breakthrough, when humans first harnessed the predatory desires of another being against itself to catch and kill it. Although they were already hunting with various tools, the invention of the lure marked a turning point, now humans patiently awaited their calculated plot to play the desires of another being to its own disadvantage.
Today, the abundance of microplastics in the ocean threatens to disrupt the entire global ecosystem, and human civilization is not exempt. Aside from micro plastics, in coastal areas, larger pieces of plastic are often mistaken for food and ingested whole by fish and birds.
In Welcome Back to Wasteland Fishing, Riley gleans discarded single use and household plastic items from two New York City beaches (Gerritsen and Plumb Beach) and fashions the trash into DIY fishing lures he then uses to catch fish. Riley presents his experimentation and field research in the genre of popular YouTube fishing tutorial. Within these actualizations of hyper masculine tropes and bucolic imaginings amateur videographers often interweave subtle product endorsements and have gained mass appeal for their calming slow pace.
Primal instincts are the core implement of consumer entrapment: as our own desires to reconnect with the dwindling natural world are coupled with convenience, we chase our own lures towards another turning point in human civilization. Accompanying the video will be a display of over a hundred lures made from reclaimed beach plastic, arranged on a table like specimens.
Duke Riley received his BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA from Pratt Institute. Riley has had solo exhibitions at Magnan Metz Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, the Queens Museum of Art, and the Havana Biennial (2009 and 2015), among other venues. He has received numerous awards and commissions, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, the U.S. State Department’s SmARTpower Program in China, and the MTA Arts For Transit commission for the Beach 98th Street Station renovation. In 2016, Riley partnered with Creative Time and the Brooklyn Navy Yard to produce the public art sensation, Fly By Night, which was again produced in 2018 by 1418 Now and the London International Festival of Theater.
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Duke Riley: Welcome Back to Wasteland Fishing | Press Release | Installation View | Review in Brooklyn Rail
