ARTISTS
DANNIELLE TEGEDER
SELECTED PRESS
Dannielle Tegeder "Chicago Index of the Invisible", Time Out Chicago, 2007
With the growing frequency of complicated diagrams, overlaid patterns and color-coded graphs generated through mapping and graphic design computer programs, we are confronted with increasingly sophisticated means of presenting complex materials visually.
“The Chicago Index of the Invisible” plays these antiseptic, digital formats against themselves by employing maps with gaudily colored push pins, vellum overlays, neatly drawn ink lines, handwritten lists, ripped masking tape and pencil marks that have no obvious relation to anything. With passport photographs arranged in a grid, Missing People in Illinois (2007) takes a tightly composed police or public announcement and undermines its officiousness and graphic monotony with overlays, helter-skelter marks and pictures of varying irregular sizes to break up the monotony. At the same time, especially in the video component of the exhibition, these stories are depersonalized through their reduction to statistics and the factual information of a police report. To reach the video projection, one enters a dark room with a low ceiling, climbs a ladder and pops up in a tight attic space. On the screen, run-down homes, forlorn fields and derelict interiors go by. Each picture is associated with the last known whereabouts of a missing person, but their uniform texture of disrepair and poverty homogenizes the individual stories and places.
The exhibition shuttles between personalizing these stories and presenting them as statistics. In doing so, it poses the difficult question of how numbers and collected information might resonate emotionally—how all those boring records tell a story.
James Glisson