Andrew Douglas Underwood Art Talk, Moderated by Peter Simek

Sunday, June 23rd, at 2:00 pm

The MAC is honored to welcome exhibiting artist Andrew Douglas Underwood and well-known arts editor Peter Simek and for an art talk and discussion of the current exhibition, The Fall of Bonnie and Clyde.

Peter Simek is the arts editor for D Magazine, where he writes about movies, art, and culture and edits D’s online arts and entertainment website, FrontRow. In addition to cultural reporting and critical writing, he has written features on topics ranging from soccer hooligans to insurance fraud investigators. Previously to D Magazine, Simek co-founded and edited Renegade Bus, a cultural journal. His writing has appeared in Salon, Film Threat, and other publications.

Andrew Douglas Underwood was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1974. He lives and works in Dallas, Texas. One-person exhibitions include: Archive of Shadows at the Mildred Hawn Gallery at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas, 2011, and An Evening of Alchemy at The Reading Room, Dallas, Texas, 2010. Austin, Texas-based Pastelegram’s online issue #2 was built around Underwood’s web-based project, At the Weehawken Dueling Ground, July 11, 1804, 2012. In 2012 Underwood co-founded the Dallas artist collective The Art Foundation.
The story of Dallas outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow is overlaid with symbolic imagery primarily relating to the fall of man. Through a multi-dimensional realization, the work in sound, drawing, painting, text, and sculpture employs the classical artistic device of symbolism, to untether the familiar story of Bonnie and Clyde from historical specificity, allowing a new perspective on their story from an encompassing distance.

This project’s foundation is based on extensive research that is distilled to reveal only those details with the greatest potential to be charged with symbolic references. In classical religious depiction the use of symbolism was de rigueur. The image of a serpent was rich with meaning, referencing everything from Satan to sex. Allusions to art history and religion are a key element to this work, because in layering them on a contemporary narrative those associations reseat the narrative in a new context.
Imagery and text from the first few chapters of Genesis in the Bible and John Milton’s Paradise Lost turn up in various iterations through the exhibition, not only in what is being depicted, but also in the medium in which an image is rendered. Materials such as ash, charcoal, and gunpowder, used throughout the show, tie into the content of the narrative.

In the larger cultural consciousness, Bonnie and Clyde have entered a folkloric realm due to a romanticized retelling of their story. By playing into the larger than life status, The Fall of Bonnie and Clyde refocuses on the timeless theme of the doomed love story and on the larger forces at work on that story, visible or not.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC