Andrea Dezsö  Sometimes In My Dreams I Fly

Growing up, Andrea Dezsö was obsessed with space travel. Dezsö explains, “There was always this idea of a possible escape place, and because we did not have passports and could not go anywhere in Communist Romania, travel was only possible in your mind. What captured my imagination was how not being able to go somewhere physically opens the possibility of epic mental Odysseys, and how we can stuff empty space with rich imaginary worlds, then move in.”

For her installation Sometimes in My Dreams I Fly, Dezsö expands upon a technique she uses to make her distinctive “tunnel books.” Small, handmade books that reveal three-dimensional scenes, tunnel books are created from layers of paper that are individually drawn, cut out, and painted. Each layer is then stacked one in front of another in a collapsible case to create a miniature world with depth and detail that draw in the viewer. At Rice Gallery, Dezsö’s tunnel books become life-size, with tunnels as wide as six feet. The individual “tunnels” are placed just behind Rice Gallery’s large front glass wall, creating portals a viewer can peer into but enter only with their imagination. The human scale is a departure point to another reality. Explains Dezsö, “I want to transport the viewer, as when you pass by a house and look into a window and see a different world from your own.”

Much of Dezsö’s work refers to, as she puts it, a “childhood, which never entirely went away.” An ethnic Hungarian, who grew up in Transylvania, Romania, Dezsö describes most of her childhood memories as “quite sweet,” despite shortages of medicine and food, censorship, and ethnic discrimination. Books were very important to her. She says, “We didn’t have access to contemporary publications so we read the classics. We lived in books. Travelled through them.” After three years of trying to get into the local art college and not being accepted because of ethnic quotas, she emigrated to Hungary in 1989 – a process that took 18 months and countless bribes. At the Hungarian University of Design in Budapest, she received a BFA and MFA in graphic design, and shortly thereafter in 1997, moved to New York, where she has lived and worked since.

In New York, Dezsö began to reflect on her life in Romania by creating one-of-a-kind books, paper-cuttings, and embroideries to tell open-ended, idiosyncratic narratives involving larger-than-life praying mantises, looming forests, fantastical gardens, factories, sputniks, astronauts, aliens, and people in bunny suits, to name just a few reoccurring characters. Dezsö continues to hone what one writer describes as her “folk toolkit,” preferring the handmade to the computer aided. She has worked recently in stop-motion animation, mosaics, ceramics, as well as traditional Japanese techniques of indigo dyeing and the ancient art of fusuma-e screen painting, becoming the first Westerner in Kamiyama, Japan to ever paint such a screen during a residency there. Her installation at Rice Gallery is her first site-specific installation.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Born in Transylvania, Romania, Andrea Dezsö received a BFA in Graphic Design & Typography (1994), and an MFA in Visual Communication (1996) from the Hungarian University of Design in Budapest. In 1997, she moved to New York where she lives and works as an Assistant Professor of Media Design at Parsons The New School for Design. Dezsö has had solo exhibitions in Hungary, Japan, and New York. Her work has been in numerous group exhibitions, most recently, Slash: Paper Under the Knife, at the Museum of Arts & Design, New York (2009). Awards, honors, and residencies include a Jean Michael Kohler Arts/Industry residency (2009), Kamiyama Artist-in-Residence, Tokushima, Japan (2008), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship(2007), and a Six Points Fellowship in Visual Arts (2007). For New York City’s Arts in Transit program, Dezsö created Under The Garden (2009), a poster appearing in subway cars throughout 2010. Community Garden, a large-scale public mosaic for the Bedford Park Boulevard subway station was awarded Best American Public Art (2007). Her illustrations have appeared inThe New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Time Magazine, andNewsweek. In 2007, Dezsö created a special wrap-around jacket that folded out into a full-size poster for Issue 23 of the literary quarterly, McSweeney’s.

PRESS
Exhibition in 
Pucker Gallery
12 January 2013

Article by Bill Lasarow,
The Huffington Post
30 December 2010

Exhibition in 
Gallery Wendi Norris
7 October 2010

Post in
The Baytown Sun
7 August 2010

Interview with Meghan Hendley,
KUHF 88.7 FM
2 July 2010

Review by Troy Schulze,
Visual Art Source
10 May 2010

Article by Douglas Britt,
Houston Chronicle
7 April 2010

Feature in
ArtBabble
April 2010

Article in
Tablet Magazine
25 March 2010

Article by Keith Recker,
HandEye Magazine
5 November 2009

Article by Roja Heydarpour,
The New York Times
5 June 2007

Photos by Nash Baker  © nashbaker.com