A trip to the non-place

Monica Dixon opens exhibition in Guillermina Caicoya

Diego Medrano
El Comercio, November 2017

Monica Dixon (New Jersey, 1971) presents in Guillermina Caicoya:' Somewhere... Nowhere' (until 24 December). Her isolated little houses, inhabited but without human figures, so many times in the middle of nowhere, according to the author's own confession, is the trip to the non-place. A reflection on internal and external construction. Her interest in the concept of empty space does not perish: <<the emptiness occupies both my interiors and my exteriors. Of the former, I am interested in light as a function of space in contrast with that darkness that leads to an abstraction of minimalism itself. Light and shadow is the empty space marked by zen>>>.

Her isolated little houses, in the middle of nowhere, symbolize the journey to deep America, they are more mental than physical spaces that help to free us from stress. Dixon unites avant-garde minimalism with exteriors where musicality lies in memory, mostly in non-existent places. Lonely, lost houses, where part of her past is there, the most acidic and lyrical reflection possible on traditional American architecture, presided over by that halo of non-existence, almost ghostly, where the loneliness of the house goes hand in hand with the loneliness of the person, where introspection leads us to look at what we really are:<These houses can help us identify with the self. The human figure does not appear but is latent. You can see the footprint or hand of the human being everywhere>. It is the occupied/unoccupied civilization, always another.
The limits of the puzzle cannot be clearer: in/out against minimalism/abstraction. Buildings, as in a maximum poem of modernity, are moods.  The landscape does not exist and everything is vision from the imagination.

Dixon is stateless, planetary, marked with fire by the long esplanades of Pennsylvania, with a world of farmland that is also a world of fear, where the action takes place within it, also of the spectator and where the questions proposed are explained without hesitation: < Does anyone live there? Doesn't anyone live? We are always alone, even accompanied by many people who love us. The United States is not just New York. I don't like the strident, the urban, there is another silence in introspection, in analytical reflection>. Her loneliness is the minimalist absence, the conceptual vertigo, the above mentioned borders between interior/exterior. Everything is recollection and debate, in a magnificent elegant world, where sophistication is in the questions we ask ourselves in the face of the resounding answers to which we assist in an impassive way.

Another debate would be that of the light of Dixon, of her manifested clarity, where her entire individualistic universe is pure present-day society. The appropriation of the territory, if we look at it, happens by an endless number of internal transformations, of intimate and critical changes that give rise to a new policy, that of the conquest or siege of a new industrialization, of rapacious technologies, which perhaps it is necessary to put a brake on. A political art, activist, citizen... Tremendous.