Robert Ladislas Derr: Day In, Day Out

Gem Center for the Arts is pleased to announce Day In, Day Out, an exhibition of a recent three-screen video installation by artist Robert Ladislas Derr; Professor Ralph Clare talks with Derr during the opening on September 9, 2019 at 7pm.

In this installation, Derr “is less interested with the body enduring the singular and more with how it perseveres through the everyday, the anything but spectacular. We all have our daily routine that we think gives sensible meaning to our lives, even if we’re half bored to death by it. After all, “habit is a great deadener,” as Samuel Beckett puts it in Waiting for Godot (1952), a play in which two homeless men waste time while waiting for some God-like dude Godot who never shows up.

Ironically, habit shields us from boredom and despair, gives us something to fill the void of Time-unto-Death, but it also deadens us to new possibilities. Derr, similar to Beckett, strips daily life and the body down to the absurd bareness of their bones. What exactly, Derr asks, is a day; how do we make meanings out of it; and what about the body that traverses it all?” --Ralph Clare