Stan Denniston

Los Soñadores

April 29, 2010 – May 29, 2010

In 2009, Stan Denniston took his decade-long stills video project – static works in a medium meant to capture motion – to the streets of Havana, Cuba. He hijacked the siestas of over 60 dreaming mutts who awoke in a ballet of new activism.

The exhibition takes form as a floor-based, 9-channel array of dilapidated televisions displaying individual sleeping dogs that, eventually, deliver a collective wonder. The installation includes stop-motion captures fashioned to suggest over-sized animation storyboards.

For leftist Boomers the world over revolutionary Cuba was a beacon, as much for its resistance to the United States as for its sub-tropical socialism. Denniston locates his contemporary canine allegory somewhere between Che Guevara’s new socialist man /woman and Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz – “we live, as we dream – alone…”, reflecting a profound ambivalence with that failed utopia, that prison island.