With funds received from the Duke University Arts Council, Assistant Professor of Dance, Andrea E. Woods Valdés was awarded a Collaboration Development.
Duke University Dance Program, Rueda de Casino Workshop
As a figurative painter, I work with the tools I have, observation and analysis distilled in paint. How did the world turn upside down so quickly while we weren't paying much attention? It becomes increasingly urgent to examine how serious discussion of all aspects of this global crisis are being thwarted by this hailstorm of distraction. LOG IN. If you would like to authenticate using a different subscribed institution or have your own login and password to Project MUSE. I seek to capture undramatic pivot points in the mutating cultural parameters of our polyglot nation. Eliot Prose. We all get tangled up in the web's overload, too often coming to our senses at the keyboard struggling to recall what we sat down to research in the first place before we got sidetracked into watching cute cats, with no time to calm down from the Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Contact Contact Us Help.{/INSERTKEYS}{/PARAGRAPH} I zoom out to high vantage points to focus on overviews, where the tangled superstructures and infrastructures of city streets, throughways, fun parks, and casinos' labyrinths reveal the overlapping vortex of systems haphazardly intersecting, channeling our hunger for at least an illusion of transcendence. Project MUSE Mission Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. I focus on the unremarkable ubiquitous structures designed and selected by small groups of mostly white men in private offices that form the backdrop to our lives,. Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. The architecture of distraction camouflaging glossy rigged systems that now dominate our lives operated originally as brick-and-mortar entertainment zones with their attendant pickpockets, crackpots, and humbug salesmen. I am a child of immigrant outsiders. My aim is to pull the unnoticed, the unquestioned background "room tone" of daily life, into the foreground, to provide space for reflection on the usually unquestioned substrates of our lives. Cultural Politics. Growing up I studied Americanness to try to fit in. Additional Information. How do the physical and the conceptual constructs of our present shape the parameters of our lived experiences? As a literalist by nature, I aim to establish some baseline of recognizable shared facts, as I perceive them, in this increasingly unstable and untruthful world. As every aspect of accepted norms in American life has come under siege, [End Page ] Click for larger view View full resolution. The twenty first century's diminishing resources and despoiled environment have triggered seismic global shifts that privilege the bare-knuckles strongman paradigm of the winner takes all created by a self-perpetuating elite caste of mega winners while transforming everyone else into an increasingly desperate sea of losers. My goal is to create a sorely needed contemplative space for examination of the web of embedded values and assumptions underpinning our apocalyptic present. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Casino Culture. I have continued this cultural surveillance in paint, foraging through images of our shifting landscape to gather visual evidence, reframing the iconic into distilled images. As every aspect of accepted norms in American life has come under siege, [End Page ]. The globalization of casino culture looms terrifyingly ascendant—economically, environmentally, and politically. Then I zoom back in to focus on individuals struggling to hold a place in the unforgiving glare of urban sprawl. {PARAGRAPH}{INSERTKEYS}Casino Culture Jane Dickson bio The globalization of casino culture looms terrifyingly ascendant—economically, environmentally, and politically. Truth has been systematically delinked from power, obscured by a shrill barrage of gossip, paranoia, and wishful thinking. Institutional Login. In painting casinos, I reflect on the psychological freight of the man-made world and its virtual web doppelganger, contemplating the social structuring of fear and desire in a world where the familiar has grown uncannily strange and frightening.