Andrea Bowers, artist, September 2009  (A Silver Platter Upon Which I Am Forced to Eat Myself)

Wow, this video is really the heaviest piece I have seen of yours.  So much about trauma.  Usually the performative element has a fictional quality or at least easily fits into a form of performance art making it seem to be representational in some way allowing for intellectual or analytical discussion of an issue.  This piece is so raw, really reminds me of some of Paul McCarthy's performances where he inhabits or channels his characters.  Also reminds me of McCarthy in that the abused has the potential of becoming an abuser - no proof in this but your mind goes there. The first half of the dialog is really disturbing - confronting dark taboos.  The second half humanizes the "character".  I think a potential for empathy is offered up in the second setting/scene.  It seems to be a piece about psychological and sexual trauma inflicted in childhood from a patriarchal source. You might check out some of Daniel Martinez's kinetic sculptures, wax figures of himself.  I always thought the trauma in his work points to colonialism and prejudice as the perpetrator.  In your new video fiction vs. reality seem ambiguous, the real and representational are ambiguous therefore making the viewer really uncomfortable and one's ability to judge or analyze becomes difficult because of this.  

Am I totally off base? Perhaps I'm stating the obvious.  I really love the aesthetic of some of the shots and compositions.  Really powerful video Denise!!!!

Also I am reminded of another piece: Mike Kelley filed a child abuse report against Hans Hoffman.  

Artist Alison O’Daniel, July 2009 (Intimate Address/Adulterer)

I think this video is perfect. As art and as life. It describes what I want out of feminism and art. It's so wholly unwilling to accept anything but honesty and truth without concealing it behind power plays, desire, and flirtation-as so much feminist work has done in the last 30 years. Mine included-indeed this is the very thing I've wrestled with.

And having been there with you during that summer, watching, it started out as slightly awkward knowing what you were talking about-as if I had a perspective that isn't addressed in the piece. But then it unfolds and isn't awkward that I know what I know or saw what I saw...instead it's a relief because it speaks what we never speak. And ultimately, I think this is what we are all aiming for. At least this is my philosophy- to aim for a disclosure and an honesty that is not in contradiction with empowerment...and most importantly simultaneously owns itself within vulnerability. Usually, work about vulnerability- much of mine has done this, and much of your other work does this - still relies on harnessing sexual desire I think, in a dishonest way, that often cancels the aim out and becomes an imploding wannabe feminist mess. This mess is what so many people respond to and want and are titillated by...and yet I can't shake the feeling that it hands the power right back to the audience because they can name it and understand it. And sometimes, often if we really take the time to think about it, this is interesting because it points to the failure of us. But I think, in this piece, it works in an opposite direction...you display the point of vulnerability not as a sexual prowess, but from a space of defeat and in saying what hasn't been and usually isn't said, you find power.

 Lori Waxman, Austin 360.com, July 2009

Everything about Denise Prince's video Beck feels raw and unguarded, full of intimacy and confidence. Of course it is constructed to communicate just that. The artist appears in a sexy sheer bra and a pair of old panties, her hair disheveled and lips chapped. The setting is a bare, acid yellow bedroom whose floral mattress has had its sheets stripped back. What the artist does there is sit close up to the camera and tell a personal story, ostensibly about the musician Beck, whom she'd met years ago, before he was famous. What the story is really about, however, is not Beck but what it takes to feel and project confidence and to need intimacy and attain intimacy. Never mind how Beck provides the excuse for this discourse, what's far more compelling is the twist that Prince herself offers by suggesting that her character lacks confidence and intimacy, while exuding both of them in this video. Her unpampered and carefully mismatched semi-nakedness suggest both confidence and intimacy overtly, but anyone with a sense of styling could fake it. No, what really proves that the woman on the screen already has what she's asking for is what she does in the last part of the video, after the storytelling is over. She dances. She dances to no music we can hear, though it looks like it has a fabulous, hard, complex beat. She dances like a banshee. She dances on the bed. She dances like a nut. She dances with a big, black dog. She dances like she's happy and strong, even if just secretly so.

Jerry Saltz, Art Critic for New York Magazine, April 2009

You're video is excellent; very raw, mysterious, revealing, complex, and vulnerable, radically vulnerable. You are telling your secrets while keeping them secret.
I did think of the early Pipilotti Rist tape, “I’m Not a Girl Who Misses Much” and maybe Gillian Wearing’s “Dancing in Peckem.”
But the work is still very strong. Keep me posted.
Way to go.
Jerry

Artist Andrea Bowers, May 2009 (Letter to Wes Anderson)

Denise. I like this video. It's so strange with all that pink and the visor! The visor is amazing and somehow throws the whole thing all out of whack in a brilliant way. I like the more minimal dialogue. I think it is interesting directing. It is video that has a totally female sensibility to quote a Lynda Benglis video. This video will make guys squirm. That's why I love it. The only issue I had was the camera not being level to the horizon line. It's great!

WOW! You are brilliant...incredibly thought provoking and moving...erotic and sad and beautiful all at the same time. You are incredibly talented. Thanks for sharing this. BRAD ARMSTRONG

I watched your new videos--very intriguing and brave work. So raw. I couldn't turn my eyes away which is the opposite reaction I have to most video. The background scenery was beautiful--all that beige grass reminded me of a Wyeth painting.

Jenny Levonian

Michael Measel to gallerist Apama Mackey, December 2008

Your (artist) is depressing… but hot.

EFFEARTE gallery is pleased to announce the inauguration of Denise Prince's first personal exhibition in Italy on 7 May 2009 at 7pm at 13 Via Ponte Vetero, Milan.

The Texan artist will stage a unique show immediately “outside” the gallery (on the sidewalk) and will invite us to come “inside”, into her world, in this way involving both the art-loving public attending the inauguration and also passers-by.
 
“Beyond This Thing Between Us” is the title of this extraordinary project which will have three distinct parts: the screening of a video, a sincere monologue-commentary on love and its most characteristic emotion: solitude; a selection of photographs that clearly show, through the astute use of light, characters experiencing the moods investigated, submerged in an increasingly revealed nature. The third part is the original work that gives the show its name, representing both the overture and the culmination of the exhibition.
 
A large transparent PVC bubble, which to paraphrase Virginia Woolf we could call “a bubble of one’s own”, is the place-platform where the artist takes refuge and acts her part, becoming both the subject and narrative device.  Denise Prince seals herself inside the bubble and in moments that are almost theatrical, but absolutely natural, tackles the theme of amorous passion, the passion of a woman who feels “too much” in love, and yet terribly alone. The artist will be surrounded by the rustling, trilling and warbling of twenty fluttering yellow canaries, allusive metaphor of the spring-like season of love in which she envelopes herself. Desultorily, she will admit, but only at the very last minute, an occasional man, an anonymous and unknown boyfriend who, for a short moment, becomes the absent yet compensatory part of this diary of desire. 

Inward and film-like are the qualities that define Denise Prince's complex artistic profile. Each image appears to be a gloss on Raymond Carver's characters (“You don’t know what love is”) while compassion and understanding seem to be inevitable and no form of detachment is possible. The artist depicts herself as an adventurous and brave woman, a woman who loves action, confronting a public which becomes an inevitable and unpredictable external mirror, just as she pushes towards profound introspection and an intense exploration of her emotions, towards that “Beyond This Thing Between Us” delivered in a sincere and transparent way, like the bubble she finds herself in.

EXHIBITION:  Beyond This Thing Between Us
ARTISTS: Denise Prince
INAUGURATION:  Thursday 7 May 2009; 7pm
VENUE:   EFFEARTE Gallery
    13, Via Ponte Vetero, 20121 Milan
   Tel. (+39) 02 39198484
    e-mail info@effeartegallery.com
    Info: www.effeartegallery.com
PRESS OFFICE:  Olivia Spatola
   
e-mail olivia.spatola@equipemilano.com
 

Andrea Bowers, December 2008 (Soldier)

...the Soldier piece... is amazing!  Really complex and problematic in a super interesting way!  I mean that as a total compliment.  The complexities of the narratives and autobiography is really powerful.  Where does the self begin and end and how do we internalize and deal with the trauma of the world around us and the trauma we cause to each other.  The gender bending is great too -the way you have added religion and nationality to issues of gender relationships.  The piece seems to be mainly about power in relationship to identity and the ethical complexities surrounding the subject matter in the work.  It's the best of what I have always admired about your work - it won't accept or allow an easy moral solution in an artwork (and probably in life) and yet it honestly admits the ethical and moral failures that are part of being human.  Really tough and amazing piece!!! Really amazing.  Hey that shot of you at the beginning in the light with your hair blowing.  That is fucking beautiful.  Don't be afraid to do more stuff like that.  That kind of crazy beautiful aesthetic that you can capture is a real gift and a really powerful manipulative tool.  Not many people can do that.

Jerry Saltz, Senior Art Critic of The Village Voice, June 2004

Denise Prince Martin’s Jesus, Empire Waist investigates the last great unexplored frontier of art — the secret life of women.

Edward Rubin Art Critic, New York, NY Art City Austin Fair, April 2008 (Celebrity Topiary)

The thing I enjoyed most… is the topiary. I think it’s the most original thing in the show.

I have never heard of anything so raw in my life. I really respect your honesty… You are an intense person and you seem to have no fear. I know you must but you really put yourself out there.

Sara Simon Behrnes October 2008

Wonder Women, Mary Anne Connolly, bRILLIANT, August 2004

Encountering the photographs of Denise Prince is like launching into a novel on a random page. You can only fill in so much. There’s no certainty of what’s happened up to this point in the story. Her haunting portraits, a disparate family of anonymous, real women of every age and body type, clothed in chiffon to charmeuse, face us with honestly and eloquence despite their silent gaze. Staged with props as common as purses and bouquets or as bizarre as half-open gourdes and a stuffed Tweety bird, the subjects compliment their settings, even though they look like they’ve never been there before. One woman stands in an open desert, another a grocery store aisle. Here, a forest, there, a dumpsite. Stories started mid-stream leave you to fill in the blanks.



Things I Never Told You: The Photographs of Denise Prince, Risa Puleo, catalogue essay Women and Their Work, May 2007

...Applying rhetoric from literary theory and Roland Barthe’s essay “Rhetoric of the Image” to define how narrative functions in contemporary photography, Lucy Soutter writes, “Photography is always and yet never a narrative form: always in that it contains the permanent record of the act of photographing and of any actions that were in progress at the moment of exposure, never in that it remains forever static... Caught in a state of permanent suspense vis a vis events that have just happened or are about to take place, photographs contain essential seeds of narratives that can never come to fruition except in the imagination.” Soutter’s discussion provides useful terms for deciphering the codes in Prince’s images. By separating the act of photographing from the actions being performed in the photograph - narration from narrative - we can begin to understand the rhetoric of Prince’s images and the strategic way in which she “frames” her tales.

...Though Prince references imagery from a history of representations of woman in art sine the Renaissance, Cindy Sherman is the artist to whom Prince is most indebted to conceptually. Where thirty years ago, Cindy Sherman used the visual codes of cinema to imply narrative in photography and explore the way in which women are framed in film in her Untitled (Film Stills), Prince employs the visual syntax of editorial fashion and style photography. Seducing through slickness, saturated color, professional styling and art direction, Prince’s photographs appeal to commercial sensibilities. But she then disrupts with details, the very ones that fashion photographers airbrush out to create their images of desire, and individual elements fail to coalesce. Rather than creating and marketing desire, images in the series complicate, even usurp, desire by amplifying the contrivance of fashion photography to the level of the absurd.



Inner Worlds We Inhabit: Denise Prince Martin's photographs transport us to places within where the unspoken lives, Clayton Maxwell, Austin Chronicle May 2007

AC: Your settings are so fantastic and unusual: the parking lot of a motel, an oil refinery, a fallow field. What do you look for in backgrounds? How do you know when you've found one that works?

DPM: I was a filmmaker, so I take my film experience into the photos, as if they were little scenes. That motel you mentioned ... speaks of something else – of summer, of that quintessential place. The title of that one is Vibrating Bed. To me, it's about the wildness of childhood. When I was young and a motel had a vibrating bed, I thought, "How funny and exciting that you put a coin in there and the bed vibrates!" And yet a part of me knew that it was about something else and that it wasn't really for children. There was something there beyond my experience. So it had that little bit of danger. That photo is alluding to freedom, to that place where you don't judge. And even if you were a grownup who was going to have sex on a vibrating bed, you'd have to have a pretty good sense of humor.