DIANNE BLELL
FINE ART PHOTOGRAPHY
Performance & Installations
1975-1979
Titles, year and descriptions below
Surrealism and the Blues
1975
Performance Installation
Mission District, San Francisco
A performance and installation in which a female figure appeared in the highly placed window of an anterior wall in an abandoned storefront space in San Francisco’s Mission District. With the doorway’s draperies sewn shut, the figure emerged for one segment during the background music provided by a recording of Sidney Bechet’s “Bechet and the Blues.” The physicality of the elevated window figure represented a surrealist personification of the barriers between the passive voyeur art audience and the realities of the real female in the art experience.
Oasis For A Gallery
1977
Photographic Installation
John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco
The culturally paradoxical photograph of a nude female mage astride a camel is a metaphorical analogy between the occurrence of a single evocative image permeating the austere gallery context and the fertile area of vegetation that interrupts the arid expanse of a desert. The rich use of the photographic format provides a vehicle to transport the imagination to the time and space in which the event occurred, therefore supplanting the necessity of experiencing of the actual event.
Odalisque
1976
Billboard Installation
Burlesque Club District, San Francisco
Presented as a detail from a classical nude “Odalisque” the billboard incorporated the surrounding pedestrian ambience as participating accoutrements into the virtual realm of the complete traditional composition. “Clothed by definition in art history’” and posed according to the canons of traditional painting, the classical nude in the billboard parodied the economic use of voyeurism and seduction in art, advertising and burlesque. through the veneer of fine art, the classical nude billboard both illustrated and retained unprecedented immunity from civic censorship against the unrefined establishments of the burlesque district.
Portrait of a Lady for a Contemporary Collection
1978
Photographic Installation
Matrix Program, University Art Museum
Berkeley, California
Photographic work and video documentation from a professionally produced fashion shoot, involving professional hair, makeup artists and incorporating fashions, furs, jewelry from San Francisco’s high end department store, i.magnin’s, as an installation and commentary within the permanent collection galleries.
Nature Morte avec Jazz et Cigarette
1976
Television Broadcast
“A Tight 13 Minutes”
Museum of Conceptual Art, San Francisco
A still life for television in which the elements of time, movement and sound were provided by the duration of the diminishing length of a burning cigarette, its rising smoke against the background music of Keith Jarrett’s “Koln Concert.”
Oh You Punk! Love DiDi: A Dated Issue
1978
Installation page
Slash Magazine
A visual commentary on concurrent generational styles involving timely philosophical implications and consequential fashion expression.
Tri-Quarterly 47, Love/Hate
Winter 1980
Published by Northwestern University
Photographic performance works commissioned for cover and interior illustrations by Tri-Quarterly Review. Three short stories were chosen in which the female protagonists caused the death by blade of their male protagonists.