Désire

Wesleyan University Zilkha Gallery

Middletown, CT. May 2008

May 2008 marked the 40th anniversary of the student uprisings in Paris. Andrea Ray's three-part installation, Désire, re-visits that historic moment to pose a question, longingly and perhaps romantically, about the present: Could the Paris model of community, social and political agency be employed in this country at a time when deepening crisis is coupled with fear and apathy?

  

The three components of Désire include Occupied, a series of soft focus photographs of now empty intersections of Paris streets once blocked by students in May of 1968. The Gift is a sculptural installation consisting of chairs surrounding a table that is embedded with speakers. At her dinner parties on rue Saint-Benoît, Marguerite Duras often hosted artists, writers and activists. The Gift, then, is the result of a dinner party from Ray's home. The recorded conversations focused on issues of agency, social change, thoughts about protest and revolution - whether or not they are outmoded and what forms might effectively replace them. 

The invited guests were Sharon Hayes, Carlos Motta, Greg Sholette, Michael Blum, and Janet Koenig.  Everyone has a practice that goes beyond the gallery, or is also involved in activism.  These artists' central concerns are around the individual agency of the artist, and the citizen.  The conversations at the dinner were recorded and are replayed in The Gift on individual speakers at each place setting. Rehearse, consists of two large speakers playing a two part play loosely based on Duras' screenplay for the 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour. 

Together the three pieces reflect a repetitive search for things seemingly unattainable-a complete understanding of war, an experience of productive social change through protest and an association with an effective community.  As its title might suggest, Ray's work ruminates on desire, and the state of wanting and lack through a presence of absence. 

During a residency in Paris in 2004, she discovered that all she was interested in "was either dead or gone-the intelligentsia, May 1968, important theorists and my Marguerite Duras."  For Ray, Désire was motivated by a desire to "align [herself] with a history, build on it and enliven it to move forward."

- Nina Felshin, curator Wesleyan University Zilkha Gallery