Dawn Dedeaux at the Contemporary Arts Center - video installation; New Orleans, Louisiana

Art in America, June, 1993 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

In a city where relatively little attention is given to political art, it was no small event when the Contemporary Arts Center turned over nearly all its exhibition space to Dawn Dedeaux's sprawling, confrontational, video-based installation Soul Shadows: Urban Warrior Myths. Dedeaux's insight and imagery developed during 18 months of workshops she conducted with young inmates of the Orleans Parish Prison. She directed their efforts in the creation of artists' books (one, A Book of Judgments, was on view at CAC), which revealed to her something of the desperation and strength of these young men, and the elaborate iconography of power and transcendence they have cultivated.

The installation centered on a long, tapering corridor made of gypsum board, hung with photo panels showing the blurred silhouettes of shadow dancers and stained by the glow of the red and yellow fluorescent tubing that lined the passageway at foot level. The corridor terminated with a large iconlike photo of a young African-American man (identified as a former gang leader) wearing shorts and a gun-shaped medallion and holding a target over his abdomen. In a nearby chamber were hung 20 bannerlike images of the same model posing with different props and accessories. This was the series Urban Warrior Myths, large (up to 8 feet by 12 feet) photographic images printed on matte acetate and hand-painted with gold. The model appeared in a range of guises, including multicultural gods (Baal, Siva, Pan Ku, Poseidon, Apollo), religious martyrs (Christ, Saint Sebastian) and popular heroes (John Wayne, John McEnroe). Most chilling was the final image, Passage, in which, in an apparent ritual of initiation, the youth places his gun medallion around the neck of a younger boy.

Ten small video screening rooms were accessible by circling the installation at its outer perimeter. The entrance to each cubicle displayed a photo of a front door barricaded by iron bars. Above each entrance was an electronic sensor that turned on a light at the passing of each viewer, like the porch light of an anxious resident responding to a noise heard outside. Included among the videos were interviews with gang members and prison inmates, a walk down the street with a youth listening to rap music on a boom box, a performance by one of Dedeaux's workshop groups and documentary footage of the aftermath of a housing-project shooting, the last shown on a 10-by-12-foot screen. Within the rooms and throughout the installation, the visitor was assaulted by a confusion of competing soundtracks and by unexpected encounters with "video holes," rat-sized openings in the wallboard which exposed monitors showing shadow dancers, video "snow" or the visitor's own face picked up by a surveillance camera. Thanks to an outdoor speaker, the visitor was greeted--and pursued--by recorded voices even in the street.

One press release explained that Dedeaux, who is white, was initially motivated by the need to exorcise here own racial fears. In the end she came across largely as an honest broker of information who avoided the pitfalls of contrition and self-congratulation. Some African-Americans did voice misgivings about their community being one-sidedly represented as a hotbed of sociopathology. And in her exposition of the imagery of empowerment and immortality that sustains the young inmates, Dedeaux sometimes came dangerouly close to glamorizing their condition. Finally, Dedeaux's work brought to the fore some questions about the video medium itself. Today, with the proliferation of "reality" TV and the explicitness of talkshows, the impact of videos of grieving mothers, addicts and crime scenes is inevitably blunted. Dedeaux's most effective video may have been the one that was most blatantly staged. If featured young boys tap-dancing for quarters on Bourbon Street and holding up cards that spelled out GIVE ME A JOB.