Anna & Leo Daedalus
with Samuel Miller
Portland, Oregon
Worldviewer 60
$1000
To purchase this work please contact Laura at 23 Sandy Gallery.
The Worldviewer 60 looks back to a pre-digital era when matter did the heavy lifting in the way we communicated about the world. Families bought globes for the kids, not as decor but as pedagogical and self-improvement tools. People mailed postcards, not to be nostalgic or cute but because paper, carried across the world by human beings and their vehicles, was how we networked at a distance. Information that today seems too volatile to commit to print was weighed, curated, and designed into long-labored encyclopedias and Time-Life volumes. That expensive 1952 encyclopedia set held forth on Piltdown Man with undiminished authority in 1954, and it still does, ever proud in its embracing mildew.
That book, that globe, was a commercial monument to the striding positivist project of its day, when elaborate dioramas roamed the earth and maps reached out to overtake their territory. Today we may smile at that time, but we do so at our own peril if we imagine we have outpaced it. Quite the contrary; we have only found a new, more mercurial language for it. Our satellite maps and infographics quiver in what we, no less self-satisfied than ever, call “real time.” Our knowledge has shed an unfashionable attention span, but not its self-importance.
The Worldviewer 60 is a eulogy, winking but not ironic. Nostalgic, yes, but with a nostalgia that keeps its accounts current. It is a eulogy for the human scale and the eloquence of matter, and a happy testament to the noble silliness of the human quest for the definitive. Sooner or later every conviction dog-ears like an old postcard depicting, in broad, declarative colors, condemned monuments from a lost colony. Addressed to Piltdown Man in Lamarck’s sanguine hand, the inscription reads, timelessly, “Wish you were here.”
Altered nested globes, door viewers, battery-operated lights, approx. 300 images, and accompanying unique artist’s book. 16 inches diameter, with stand approx. 22 inches high, 2011.
Artist Biographies
A multi-disciplinary artist, Anna Daedalus works primarily in photography and performance and frequently collaborates with poets, writers and videographers on such things as artist’s books, video work, film festival curation, and absurdist performance in a Dada/Fluxus vein. She has shown her large-scale photographic prints in Portland and Seattle. Anna’s work can be found in various collections, including the John Wilson Special Collections at the Multnomah County Library and the Beinecke Library at Yale University. She holds a B.A. in Spanish Literature from Reed College and she lives and works in Portland, Oregon with her husband/collaborator Leo Daedalus.
Polyvalent artist Leo Daedalus does things in writing, video, performance, music, comedy, dada/fluxus activity and other nonsense. He collaborates regularly with his wife, Anna, especially on artist’s books under the imprint Disposable Books. In Portland since 2005, projects include multimedia lecture-opera The Theory of Love with John Berendzen, Anna Daedalus and David Abel, and Parallaxis, a concert of video and live music co-produced with FearNoMusic. Leo speaks seven languages, keeps four chickens, and is proud to have made a thorough fool of himself MC’ing the Richard Foreman Mini-Festival of performance art in October, 2011.
Born in Nebraska and raised in New Mexico, Samuel Miller is a filmmaker currently residing in Portland, Oregon. He is presently in the research phase of his next project, which is based on the romantic relationship of his great-great aunt and an unknown WWII navy officer whose ship was sunk in battle. His latest diversions include collecting bryophytes and studying ants.