Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works

Nancy Dwyer
American (b. 1954)
FREE MONEY(1985)
bronze
45" x 62" x 9"

STYLE: feminism,
mass media

 ©Nancy Dwyer

As a "media child," Nancy Dwyer is interested in using banal scenes from everyday life depicted in a carefully uninflected style. Dwyer does little to add to the "meaning" of her work, concentrating instead on surface design and graphic drama. Free Money depicts a man throwing (or catching) a ball. Although the figure is clearly and broadly delineated, his action is still somewhat mysterious: the viewer must fill in the blanks of Dwyer's ironic narrative.
It helps if the viewer applies lessons learned from the language of mass media and advertising. Often, in the language of these works, strongly suggestive imagery is combined in ways to create a message favorable to a commercial interest. Dwyer employs these means, but to a completely different—and more ambivalent—end.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Marcia Tucker, Artforum, 11/89
"Dwyer courts the obvious, tries to make her ideas accessible; she's as much drawn to advertising as she is to art history, and especially to television, which she points out is 'just about as old as I am, so that it's something to get a handle on'. As a result, she isn't interested in making art about art...'The biggest art issue,' Dwyer maintains, 'is learning about being in the world.' ...
Dwyer uses the drama of the sales pitch in her work to try to 'make poetry out of selling by forgetting that there is something to sell.'...
With Dwyer's apparently 'easy' and accessible work, the traditional terms of the relationship between art object and viewer...are altogether altered as the viewer's immediate physical engagement with the work militates against his or her passivity. 'I'm really satisfied,' Dwyer says, 'with bringing you to a space in which to think about something, but not telling you what to think. People have to make there own valued conclusions about what they look at.'"

 

 

Richard Huntington, Buffalo News, 1/24/97
"This one-time Buffalonian assaults culture in a "word" installation consisting of computer-derived prints, a light projection and the premiere of a new floor work cut from vinyl letters. ...As in ads, Dwyer's words — and words are at the heart of this work — are transformed into seductive images in their own right. Dwyer takes full advantage of the computer's unparalleled ability to manipulate letters into complex spatial configurations. Look at the ingenious wall piece 'Respect' as an example. Here, a faux-elegant script rendition of the word "respect" is formed with the lyrics of the song, compressed or extended as they swing through space. It is brilliantly artful and dumb at once."

 

Roberta Smith, NYTimes, 2/20/87
" Nancy Dwyer has long mined the area where art and advertising, images and corporate logos, art objects and commodities overlap. She has often employed non-art material such as metals and plastics, making objects that are neither painting nor sculpture, to get her points across. In her current exhibition, Ms. Dwyer has once more divided her pictorial and dimensional interests into regular painting and sculpture and, conventional as this new tack may sound, it has made her art more expansive and less busy, both visually and conceptually. Most of Ms. Dwyer's new paintings and sculptures offer up loaded, one-word concepts in forms that give them added resonance. In the sculpture titled ''Fate Built,'' the word ''fate'' is spelled out in big, boxy letters covered in granite-gray Formica so that they resemble a bench on which to ponder one's future. In the painting named ''Miracle,'' an energetically curved arrow, painted in gold and lettered with the title, zooms toward the center of an expanse of green. Like certain aspirin commercials, it seems to promise fast, fast relief, but it also acknowledges - and supplies - that certain magical ''ping'' that makes a painting a painting. "