Gary Simmons
Wake
2 February 2000
Dia Center for the Arts
Gary Simmons: Wake
A Project for the Web at Dia Center for the Arts
On February 16, 2000, Gary Simmons will launch a project for the world wide web, entitled Wake, the twelfth in Dia’s series of artists’ projects for the web. The address for the project is: www.diacenter.org/simmons
For Wake, his first project for the web, Gary Simmons has photographed empty ballrooms and other dance spaces redolent of an earlier era. As the viewer moves the mouse over the screen, image fragments appear then quickly fade, making it impossible to view any of his nine haunting scenes in its entirety and at one time. Mediated by a soundtrack comprised of the humming of old but well-known songs that are still popular favorites, these sites seem generated as much by involuntary memory as by technical intervention. As with Simmons’ earlier work, including his chalk drawings and more recently his photographs of pedagogical spaces, absence and the ephemeral are as palpably charged as what is present and lasting.
Previous projects which can still be visited on Dia’s website include Francis Alys’ The Thief, Arturo Herrera’s Almost Home, Diller Scofidio’s Refresh, Kristin Lucas’s Between a Rock and a Hard Drive, Claude Closky’s Do you want love or lust?, Tim Rollins and K.O.S.’s Prometheus Bound, Cheryl Donegan’s Studio Visit, and Molissa Fenley’s Latitudes.
