April Durham
April Durham is a visual artist and writer. She challenges boundaries between/among conventional media by making films that look like drawings and writing essays as prose poems. Unfolding complex structures by drawing anthropomorphized animals and birds who float above crop circles and through globular clusters, or writing about bootlegging grandmothers as though they were Saxon heros, her work is modeled on the overlapping arrangement of a fugue, where multiple voices speak as through a type of malfunctioning harmonium. Accumulation of information is presented with subtle demand for deciphering that is both intense and absurdly humorous.
Her recent solo show, Self Created Chameleon on the Hot Seat, featured new drawings and the book, Common Objects, a collaboration with French photographer, Olive Martin, is available from Beyond Baroque Books on amazon.com.
April holds an MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena (1999) and spent two years in France thanks to a grant from the city of Nantes and the École des Beaux Arts de Nantes. She is currently a PhD student at UC Riverside in the Comparative Literature Department researching complex notions of subjectivity and action arising out of collaborative practices, considering, for example, what collaborative aesthetic actions might contribute to contempoary understandings of "collective intelligence" and "distributed work."
Links to Recent Publications
