FROM THE MEMPHIS FLYER, EXHIBIT M
Cory Dugan's “Hapax Legomena”
POSTED BY DWAYNE BUTCHER ON THU, AUG 11, 2016 AT 1:14 PM
Cory Dugan is a Unicorn, at least to me. He was the founding editor of Number: Inc. in 1987 and was the very first art critic for the Memphis Flyer. He has also contributed articles to The Commercial Appeal, Memphis magazine, Art Papers, ArtNews, and New Art Examiner. He has exhibited his work in what is now every defunct art space in the city, including the Memphis Center for Contemporary Art. Remember that place??!! He even lived in NYC in the mid-'80s after receiving his BFA from the University of Memphis, working as a graphic designer. So, to me Cory Dugan is a mythical creature. When I was in undergrad in the late '90s, I thought no one was more important in the Memphis art world than Cory. For a little worthless artist like myself, these were/are legendary attributes. I wanted to be an artist and an art writer, Dugan was both. Just take another look at the title of his current exhibition, “Hapax Legomena.” He knows all the big words.
COMPLETE ARTICLE: http://www.memphisflyer.com/ExhibitM/archives/2016/08/11/cory-dugans-hapax-legomena
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FROM THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL, GO MEMPHIS
Schematic exhibit challenges us to think
BY FREDRIC KOEPPEL, AUGUST 26, 2016
Art occurs in so many guises because so many sensibilities exist to create and perceive it. Not all people desire the same effects from art, a principle that holds true for all kinds of artistic endeavors. In poetry, for every T.S. Eliot, there's an Ogden Nash; in fiction, for every Jonathan Franzen, there's a Nora Roberts. The greatest art encompasses all aspects that human beings require in contemplation. Just as we admire or stand in awe of the psychological insight of portraits by Rembrandt, we also swoon over the remarkable variety and feather-like touch of this master's brush-strokes. Difficult an achievement as it sounds, art can be all things to all people.
The preceding paragraph may seem like a grandiose lead-in for a review of an exhibition by a local artist, and indeed, to be perverse, the work of Cory Dugan in "Hapax Legomena," probably the most thoughtful exhibition we will see this year, will not appeal to every taste. On the other hand, while exuding an aura of chilly and hermetic intellectualism, these pieces are surprisingly and oddly sensual and beautiful, ripe with obsession and mental-metaphysical elevation, like angels dancing on the head of a pin. The exhibition will be displayed through Oct. 12 at the Beverly and Sam Ross Gallery at Christian Brothers University.
A scheme is involved, as is the case with so much art produced after, say, 1980. You know what I mean, the "My work explores the Holocaust through the lens of 1950s television sit-coms and the use of post consumer electronic waste" syndrome. For this exhibition, Dugan takes the notion of hapax legomena — a term that means a word used only once in a document or corpus — and treats it to a series of permutations that seem to imply not only a literary and scholarly intent but also an approach to the creation of all things, as in "In the Beginning was the Word." In fact, one piece is titled "Genesis," while its companion is "Exodus," the launching, as it were, and the departure.
The texts that Dugan uses for this project, resulting in an exhibition of rather chaste size and presentation, include the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, John Donne's "Holy Sonnets," Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," and the plays of William Shakespeare, offered in a video that I could not get to work, though that mishap could have been my fault rather than a technical glitch. There are only so many buttons you can push in a lifetime.
These are very much mixed-media pieces, as in, for example, "gouache, pencil, oil pastel, oil stick, laser transfer, charcoal, spray enamel," and one feels the giddy sense of the artist's glee in their hybrid accomplishment. The medium-size "Hapax: Gospel" group, one each to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, spreads the individual words, rendered in the original Greek, floating airily across tiny grid patterns against dense, cloud-like formations and coterminous with maps or schematics of what I would guess are castles and other buildings of old Jerusalem, or perhaps outlines of the ancient city itself.
The series devoted to Donne and Beckett are smaller, five in each suite, and juxtapose the words from the poems and the play in a sort of high-tension and purposeful arrangement of nonsense under the artist's renditions of, in the Donne pieces, drawings by Marcel Duchamp, and in the Beckett, of images from Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. The effect deepens the sense of words as both counters in the streams of thought and language and as isolated glyphs that radiate esoteric meanings of their own or, alien-like, none at all. One person's gibberish is another's "Paradise Lost," and the maelstrom of origins rings with a babel of cosmic coherence.
Your assignment, class, is to find every example of hapax legomena in this review.
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FROM ARTS: THE ARTS IN RELIGIOUS AND THEOLOGICAL STUDIES
Portfolio: Hapax Legomena
VOLUME 28, NO. 1 (2016)
