Dive Bar Architect: On the Work of D. E. May

<p><em>At the center of the exhibition space, there is a black table, strewn with pages and with objects, mostly small, tiny things, on cardboard, on paper. There are some wood scraps, some small bursts of pigment—rust red, sky blue, green, mustard—but the variegated brown of torn, weathered cardboard dominates, covered in more black, in puddles of ink. The cardboard pieces amount to what the art world would call “ephemera,” gathered from the workplace of the artist. They date, mostly, from the 1980s, the 1990s. They share the table with some randomly distributed white pages, as if from a book—a work entitled Portland Buffalo: Lakes of Oregon and New York, c. 1991, filled again with small brown forms, shapes strangely turd-like or organic, floating on further fields of black—a “book” that actually takes the form of a box, with all its pages unbound. The table’s entire seething array harks back to Marcel Duchamp and his boxes—like his Green Box of 1934—and one has the same feeling of being in the presence of notes or notational works, of a retrospective look back at early ideas and sketches for later, more elaborate realization. In line with seeing the jumbled pieces as notational, words erupt everywhere: in block letters or in a feeble, myopic script; as rustic calligraphy or in old-fashioned typewriter screeds; in the form of numbers, unanchored tallies, unexplained written dimensions. Some of the more excessive script moves offline in all directions, the irregular handmade lettering reading like a kind of exclamation, like words wanting to regress back to the condition of sound. It is as if we are in the presence of a voice, perhaps in the modality of a cry, a scream.</em></p>