BB had a deep affinity for Dutch “Golden Age” painting, a result perhaps of her many years in Amsterdam, but more pertinently of a shared love of the material world. These were painters fascinated by framing: not only in the form of coy devices like the pulled-back drape at the edge of the canvas, but in the literal depiction of framed pictures within their pictures. (We know the artists whose paintings Vermeer owned because he showed them so often in his own paintings.) In David Bailly’s picture, things and pictures are arrayed across the surface of his canvas. Whatever his allegorical intentions, Bailly’s concern with the observable world, in all its idiosyncratic particulars, has trumped conventional narrative. BB’s peekaboo mounting only exacerbates Bailly’s pre-occupation with distracting surfaces and the limpid connections of thoughts and things.
For Frieze Projects 2011 in London, artist Pierre Huyghe created an installation, Recollection, that included an aquarium filled with sea life. One of the sea creatures in the aquarium was a hermit crab who dwelt in a Brancusi-style head.
Douglass ‘Monodramas’, ten 30- to 60-second videos from 1991, conceived as interventions into commercial television, interrupted the usual flow of advertising and entertainment when broadcast nightly in British Columbia for three weeks in 1992.
