On the Desperate Edge of Now
Heather Cantrell, Folkert De Jong, Joachim Koester, and Marnie Weber
Dumbo Arts Center | February 2013
On the Desperate Edge of Now explores historical trauma, collective cultural experience, and personal memory as represented in contemporary visual art and horror film. Titled after the first episode of British filmmaker Adam Curtis’ 1994 BBC documentary The Living Dead, On the Desperate Edge of Now positions the construction of memory as a coping mechanism for both the individual and an international public. Expanding the notion of “horror” to include a more philosophical context of understanding the world, this exhibition employs horror cinema as a structural guide to locate the ever-present now. Through an adoption of Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson’s notion of the now as an “ever shifting amalgam of past, present, and future”, On the Desperate Edge of Now aims to evoke a haunting at DUMBO Arts Center in February 2013.