HOUSE ON CANNONBALL STREET, 2020
Photography: Etienne Frossard
House on Cannonball Street, 2020
Wood, glass louver windows, air-dried clay coated in epoxy resin, metal, foam, automotive paint, approx. 39 x 96 x 96 in.
Across Common Grounds
Bates Museum of Art
October 24, 2024 - March 15, 2025
https://www.bates.edu/museum/across-common-grounds/
Where the threads are worn
Casey Kaplan
March 18 – April 24, 2021
https://caseykaplangallery.com/exhibition/where-the-threads-are-worn/
ID: Formations of the Self
Shirley Fiterman Art Center
September 16, 2020 - February 19, 2021
81 Barclay St, New York, NY 10007
https://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/sfac/id-formations-of-the-self-page/
Press:
Artforum, “Review: Where the threads are worn,” Zoë Lescaze, Summer 2021
https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202106/where-the-threads-are-worn-85805
https://caseykaplangallery.com/news/artforum-review-where-the-threads-are-worn/
House on Cannonball Street is a sculptural work comprised of a fallen and severed tree which appears to barricade a small house with shuttered windows. Bulging fruits and long flowered stems burst from the cleaved trunks, while a peculiar and unnatural flush of green has seeped over the house and Couroupita guianensis, suggesting toxicity more than tropicality. The house itself has a foreboding presence with opaque windows, breathing holes, and handles. The artwork addresses displacement, environmental harm, and unsettled narratives of diaspora and home within colonized spaces.
The cannonball tree - Couroupita guianensis - was a prized possession on a 1922 Field Museum expedition to Guyana, one of many anthropological and botanical projects undertaken globally by institutions during a period of American imperial expansion. The trunk of a felled cannonball tree was shipped to Chicago, along with plaster molds, samples, and negatives which could facilitate mimetic reconstruction of ‘perishable parts’ for ideological and didactic exhibitions. Colonial networks of seed exchange brought the cannonball tree to other tropical territories, including Hawai`i, where Dang was born and raised. Cannonball trees tower over Honolulu’s botanical gardens and university campus as displaced giants. The tree resides strongly in Dang’s imagination, yet her family home is on a street named for cannonballs of a different kind, those fired from artillery batteries previously staged nearby, in an area once occupied by a U.S. military fortification. She brings together childlike wonder and mimetic sculptural processes in a failed attempt to reimagine a neighborhood named not for weapons of war, but for magical, giant trees.
Dang considers a continuum of displacement: land and sovereignty expropriated from Indigenous populations, cannons imported from other wars, seeds extracted from distant territories, and migrant laborers and their descendants participating in land clearing, agricultural production, and home-building within a colonial system. Dang’s practice corrupts mimetic reproduction to interrogate authoritative verisimilitude and to call attention to loss, violence, and decay. The flowers and stems appear desiccated and misshapen, resembling bones. Instead of a comforting familiarity, the house-shaped structure evokes suffocation, confinement, and threat. Dang built the structure to resemble horticultural transport carriers similar to ones the Field Museum would have employed on its expeditions. The mass-produced louver windows are an incongruous element evoking commonplace and cheap building materials used in her family’s home and in other tropical territories. Dang’s poetic and psychological narrative alludes to human control over environments and populations; she creates a visual field of reckoning, loss, and haunted displacements.