NEW YORK, NY.- The Hunter College Art Galleries are presenting Constance DeJong, a survey exhibition marking the artist’s first solo show at an institutional gallery. For over four decades, DeJong has created experimental prose writing, multimedia spoken text works, and user-navigated digital projects. Well known for her contributions to New York’s downtown performance art and avant-garde music scene in the 1970s and ‘80s, DeJong is considered one of the progenitors of media art, or “time-based media.” This exhibition highlights DeJong’s hybrid mode of art-making, featuring work from the past three decades and debuting several new works by the artist.
DeJong interrogates traditional delivery systems for language, expanding and complicating notions of narrative form, literary structures, and linear time. Her writing extends beyond the page, emerging as a disembodied voice resonating from objects such as her re-engineered radios that are programmed with audio texts she has written, performed, recorded, and mixed. In her captivating live performances, DeJong speaks her texts from memory with intricate precision, often in duet with computers, televisions, or other technological devices.
No realm of thought––whether metafiction, cosmology, or philosophy seems beyond DeJong’s pluralistic curiosity. A kind of shimmering Wunderkammer of her innovative and significant career, the exhibition celebrates DeJong’s commitment to Hunter’s MFA Studio Art program. A long-time Hunter faculty member, DeJong’s artwork and teaching on time-based practices have influenced generations of Hunter students.
On the occasion of the exhibition, an artist-designed publication has been produced that includes texts by distinguished writers, artists, and editors, as well as a previously unpublished text by DeJong. The publication will be available at the Leubsdorf Gallery for purchase.
Constance DeJong is a New York-based artist who has exhibited and performed locally and internationally. Her work has been presented at Renaissance Society, Chicago; the Walker Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; The Wexner Center, Columbus, OH; Philadelphia Museum of Art; and in New York at The Kitchen, Threadwaxing Space, The Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Dia Center for the Arts. She composed the libretto for the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha in 1983, which has been staged at opera houses worldwide, including the Metropolitan Opera, NY; The Netherlands National Opera, Rotterdam, NL, and The Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY. She has permanent audio-text installations in Beacon, NY, London, and Seattle. She has published several books of fiction, including her celebrated Modern Love (published by Standard Editions with Dorothea Tanning in 1977 and reissued by Primary Information/Ugly Duckling Presse in 2017), I.T.I.L.O.E (Top Stories, 1983), and Speakchamber (Bureau, 2013)
