Sam Durant - Alone, we are a drop | Together, an ocean 2023
- Medium: Silkscreen print on thermoformed polystyrene
- Size: 51,5 x 71,5 cm
Since the 1990s, Sam Durant’s research-driven artistic practice dissects and reframes both dominant historical narratives and forgotten facets of our collective past. Durant aims to re-examine these histories and emphasise their importance to broader social, political and cultural issues. Central in Durant’s practice are hand-drawn protest signs that the artist finds in photos of street protests. Durant translates these pancartes into light boxes. As a typical medium for signs in shops and advertising, these light boxes emphasise the necessity of personal phrases and slogans from protest movements, and often also the humorous or utopian character of the messages.
For this edition, Durant explores a new medium and reprises the motif of a hand-drawn protest sign to a thermoformed sign. As another typical medium used in advertising and commercial communication from the 1960s onwards, it also reminiscences Marcel Broodthaers’ famous Industrial Poems which were produced in the same way.
Sam Durant is a multimedia artist whose works engage a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. Often referencing American history, his work explores the varying relationships between culture and politics, engaging subjects as diverse as the civil rights movement, southern rock music, and modernism.
Over the last twenty years, Durant has mined the image archives of international protests and demonstrations, from the early twentieth century to the present, as sources for drawings and large-scale lightbox signs. In the lightboxes, hand-drawn statements are transferred from the source photographs into a format typically associated with commercial signage and advertising. Spontaneous, rapid and subjective messages are transmitted through an informational display mode; and yet the statements achieve new urgency and power from their dispassionate conveyance. Durant channels and enhances the contrarianism, humour, utopianism or challenge embedded in each handwritten slogan. The tension between emotive content and minimalist form expands the meaning of each text – opening it to different inferences and possibilities.