forced dichotomy – new collaborative work by Deanna Dikeman and Nate Fors

Friday, September 21st to Saturday, October 13th, 2007

Drawn to each other’s use of color and mutual interest in materials, artists Deanna Dikeman and Nate Fors will present a series of new, collaborative works completed this year. Functioning as photo-collage based paintings, these hybrid works take as their foundation Dikeman’s photographs of thrift shop clothing, fabric and costuming decorations. These images are then playfully transformed by Fors with paint, Plexiglas, fabric and three­dimensional features such as knobs, toys, shelves, insulating foam sealant, costuming decorations, etc. Over the course of this first-time art-making collaboration between the two artists, Dikeman has composed and created new photographs specifically to serve as “canvases” for Fors’ “paintings.”

The title for the exhibition, forced dichotomy, initially resulted from punning on the artists’ last names. Conceptually, however, it represents wrestling with the separation inherent in any two artists’ work/style/methods, and an attempt to steer them toward a convergence. Dikeman and Fors are here striving to force the extant dichotomy between photography and painting away from “difference;” instead of the “or,” they hope to posit one possible end to the bifurcation with the offering of an “and.”

This exhibition is the latest in a series of Charlotte Street Foundation/Urban Culture Project efforts to reengage/reconsider/recontextualize the work of artists recognized with Charlotte Street Awards for outstanding Kansas City visual artists over the past decade. Fors and Dikeman responded to CSF’s call for proposals from past Awards recipients more than a year ago by proposing to create and exhibit a new, experimental body of collaborative work.

Both Nate Fors and Deanna Diekman are mid-career artists who have exhibited widely in Kansas City as well as nationally. Represented by Dolphin Gallery, Fors’ work is included in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Sprint Nextel Art Collection, Spencer Museum of Art, among numerous other corporate and private collections. Dikeman’s photographs are included in numerous collections including those of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, and have been widely published, including in Photo Review and Fotophile. She is also represented by Dolphin Gallery.