Thompson Giroux Gallery, 57 Main Street, Chatham, NY 12037
The Fifth Revolution presents a series of new works by contemporary artist Dan Devine. These sculptures made of molded and stitched leather with motorcycle parts present a confluence of Devine’s personal history and artistic practice. Devine’s new work encourages an urgent rumination on the implications of the emerging fifth industrial revolution and its living machines.
The choice of leather and motorcycle parts derives from two periods of Devine’s pre-artistic career: first as a competitive motocross racer in both America and Europe and later as a leather artisan at Jamie Jacob’s leather shop on Haight Street in San Francisco during the height of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Devine employs these personally-significant materials to explore his career-long interest in recording objects and reversing conceptual boundaries. In earlier bodies of work, Devine had applied such tactics to blur the division of internal/external with his Inside-Out series (including his well-known Inside Out Cars) and of watching/watched with his Surveillance Sculptures series. In The Fifth Revolution, Devine turns his attention to the eroding boundary of biological/technological.