Lives and works in Minneapolis
AOV8 fellow
Mentor: John Kim
Most of my anxieties are born from things I see online. Articles, images, and videos produce anxious fantasies that feel real, are real. I document such anxieties and exhibit the fantasy artifacts resulting from my digital encounters.
Through their documentation and presentation, I interrogate my fantasy artifacts to betray their social structure—race, class, sexuality, gender, and nationality. I act on and document my most extreme, irrational, data born, fear-based anxieties. Maintaining a slippery connection to the “real,” these actions are presented both as art objects and as primary documents, such as live performance, lectures, archival sources, documentary video, photography, and installation.
These pieces invite moments of doubt, or pause. Located between confessional believability and humorous absurdity, my artifacts prompt ambivalence: “What do I believe and why do I believe it?”—a point of friction between fear-based thought and action.
If applied to ingesting data, this question, this moment of doubt, is agency. Doubt affords the opportunity to disentangle the personal anxiety from the collective, a chance to investigate the social structure of data anxieties, an opportunity to acknowledge, laugh at, and unpack fear and its political composition.
On December 15, 2015, my coworkers and I received an email from our employer providing resources for an active shooter situation in the workplace. After reading and watching this information, I entered public places imagining where I will run, where I will hide, and how I will fight. Run, Hide, Fight is a presentation of my own preparatory resources: instructions, plans, demonstrations, and fantasized scenarios where I attempt to perform and control specific fears I have experienced.
Dylan Redford is an artist/documentarian living in Minneapolis MN. Dylan received his BFA in Studio Art from Middlebury College. Dylan co-founded the artist run and Minneapolis based gallery Yeah Maybe and is a Moving Image Research Associate at the Walker Art Center. Mostly though, Dylan tells honestly unreliable stories.