NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Sam Durant. The exhibition, titled Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions, Washington, D.C., presents the artist’s proposal to move existing monuments commemorating massacres during the colonization of North America from their location across the country to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. This will be the Los Angeles-based artist’s first one-person gallery exhibition on the East Coast since 1997. Proposal will be on view from September 23rd through October 22nd, 2005, at 534 West 21st Street.

Scattered across the Continental United States are numerous monuments, markers and memorials that commemorate the massacres that occurred during the colonization of America from the discovery of the New World to the end of the Indian Wars in 1890. These massacre monuments reflect the violent and unequal relationship between whites and Native Americans during the creation of the republic.

The Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions consists of transposing a selection of existing massacre monuments and memorials to the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The monuments selected conform to certain criteria: they commemorate massacres involving groups of whites and Indians (as opposed to referring to individuals); and they maintain the formal category of the vertical shaft, so as to be understood in relation to the obelisk of the Washington Monument.

Unsurprisingly, the great majority of the monuments honor whites. The proposed locations for the monuments on the National Mall reflect this situation by a separation in two groups. The monuments to the white dead are located on either side of the reflecting pool that runs between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. The monuments to the Indian dead (who, in some cases, commemorate friendly Indians who were killed while helping to save white settlers) are installed on the lawn area directly in front of the Washington Monument.

The exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery presents 30 scaled-down replicas of the selected monuments. The twenty-five monuments to the dead white settlers are installed in a grid in the main space. The five monuments to the Native American dead are installed in the front space, around a maquette of the National Mall showing the proposed transpositions. Pencil drawings of each memorial are also on view in the gallery’s front space.

The transposed monuments on the National Mall, as well as the replicas in the gallery space, are re-contextualized. They become vivid reminders of the role of violence in the formation of the United States. The gesture of transposing the monuments to the National Mall underscores their traditional function: to provide a historical narrative that validates and justifies violence and loss of life through the commemoration of the victorious – a function now opened to analysis and questioning.

Sam Durant was born in Seattle in 1961 and has been exhibiting since the early nineties. His work addresses utopias and their failures, investigating the fabric of popular, particularly American, culture, and weaving relationships between defining art-historical, pop-cultural and political events. Durant has had one-person exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the Kunstverein Düsseldorf, among other venues. His work will be shown at the Xiamen International Sculpture Show in October and in a one-person exhibition at the Massachusetts College of Art in November. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com