Bio

In her video installation Civil Society, Michelle Dizon (b. 1977 Los Angeles) offers a meditation on the 2005 revolts in the Paris suburbs, relating them to the 1992 uprising in Los Angeles and to the artist’s own experience, moving across time and space to confront the difficulties of citizenship and democracy. Dizon’s narrative voice interjects with pertinent questions: “I ask about what one sees and what one doesn’t see, what one remembers and what one doesn’t remember, in effect bringing questions of vision and history to a ground zero, a site that I’ve lately been writing about as a ruin.” This ruin, a site where history and subjectivity meet, where language is overgrown and images collapse, is the place of Dizon’s inquiry. Civil Society deals with political details and broad discursive shapes, seen up close, in memory, through media, or from a passing train. While her works admit to the pleasures of looking, Dizon links that pleasure to a thoughtful critique of visuality.