INTERVIEW BY JORDAN FORD
WHITE NOISE
FILLS 214 PROJECTS
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The Dallas Art Fair debuts their new exhibit space with a solo show for Belgian artist Emmanuel Van der Auwera.
his March, as part of an expanding outreach initiative, the Dallas Art Fair will launch 214 Projects, an exhibition and project space adjacent to their new offices at River Bend in the Design District. This additional venue will allow Dallas Art Fair exhibitors to present more ambitious gallery installations and special projects on a year-round basis outside of their typical presence during the second week of April. For their inaugural exhibition, 214 Projects will present White Noise, Belgian artist Emmanuel Van der Auwera’s first solo exhibition in the United States. This project is realized with the full support of Harlan Levey Projects of Brussels, Belgium, who has been an exhibitor with the Dallas Art Fair since 2015. Dallas collector Jordan Ford speaks with the artist and provides a preview of the ambitious and challenging work that will open 214 Projects this spring. Jordan Ford (JF): We first met when you attended last year’s Dallas Art Fair with Harlan Levey Projects, and I’m thrilled that your first solo exhibition in the US will be here at 214 Projects. To start, what is the jumping-off point for the title of your show, White Noise? Is there a reference to the familiar ambient background containing “all audible frequencies of vibration” that we recognize from older television sets? Or is it possibly something more or less personal, maybe perhaps novel, to your own work?
Emmanuel Van der Auwera (EVDA): It’s nice to hear from you. I’m pretty thrilled, too! Both of your questions are on point. Yes, a reference to “white noise” as signal processing is absolutely there and yes, it’s not there alone. White Noise is also the title of a 1985 book by Don DeLillo. My last solo exhibition, Everything Now is Measured by After, also borrowed from the American author. JF: You are presenting two distinct bodies of work in the same venue, yet both contain a certain austere quietness. It may be difficult to be taken in all in one glance. How has your experience presenting them allowed you to create the initial intimate interactions with the artworks themselves? EVDA: These two bodies of work developed parallel to each other. I’ll present a third type as well, which was made while I was first starting the Memento and VideoSculpture works that you’re referring to. All three are driven by many of the same questions or ideas and were developed in dialogue with each other. They share a documentary approach to thinking about the aesthetics of mass media and certain elements of my methodology. In many ways, there were always intimate interactions between them and often the decisions made with regard to one influenced my thinking about the others. JF: In these works, both the newsprint memento series and the video sculpture from military battlefield footage, you frame the sourced material by obscuring information as well as revealing previously unseen images. What has this process
Promotional image for Emmanuel Van der Auwera’s White Noise at 214 Projects, Dallas, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Harlan Levey Projects.
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Emmanuel Van der Auwera, Memento 11 (Barcelona), 2018, newspaper and 3mm aluminum offset plate mounted on aluminum frame, 56.3 x 39 in. Courtesy of the artist and Harlan Levey Projects.
