Donald Young Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of DYG Projects: Helen Mirra, Arrow. With this exhibition Mirra presents a new video projection which continues the artist’s interest in the relationship between the natural world and the people that inhabit it.

A consideration of violence and its reverberations, the structure of Arrow is analogous to that of a thunderstorm. In a darkened space, brief flashes of images are projected within a shifting sound field. Multiple recordings of Mirra’s guitar and bass guitar are layered to create a composition evocative of rain and thunder. The sound creates a context for the image to occur within, and the image in turn affects the sound. As with Mirra’s other recent sound works, the soundtrack for Arrow was made in collaboration with Ernst Karel.

Arrow marks Mirra’s first video projection since Third, 1998. Engaging a minor character in a well-known film, Arrow uses images of the violent Babylonian tomboy, played by Constance Talmadge, from D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916). This work continues Mirra’s preoccupation with the prioritorization of the Secondary, focusing on minor languages, minor characters and fragments of the whole.

Mirra’s work has been widely exhibited internationally, including one-person exhibitions at The Renaissance Society, Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. In 1999 Mirra was the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago.

The reception is free and open to the public. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday 10-5:30, and Saturdays, 11-5:30. If you would like more information, please contact Emily Letourneau at 312.455.0100.