Xxavier Edward Carter
Anh Yēu Em
April 11 – May 11, 2021
ex ovo is pleased to present Anh Yēu Em, a large-scale installation by the artist Xxavier Edward Carter opening Sunday, April 11, 2021 with an extended reception from 12-6 pm. Two new performances by the artist will accompany the exhibition. The Failings of Man premieres on Monday, April 19 at 7 pm. Carter will perform Heaven is Going to Burn Your Eyes on Sunday, April 25 from 12-5 pm. To reserve a timed ticket for Carter’s April 25 performance, Heaven is Going to Burn Your Eyes, visit the gallery’s website. In addition to the scheduled performances, Anh Yēu Em will be open Monday–Friday by appointment, with open hours between 1–5pm on Saturdays through May 11. Contact Allison Klion (allison@exovoprojects.com | 214.695.3753) for additional information or to schedule an appointment. http://www.exovoprojects.com
Gallery: ex ovo, 414 Fabrication St, Dallas, TX 75212
Anh Yēu Em translates to “I love you,” said from the masculine perspective in the Vietnamese language. The works of Anh Yēu Em meditate on life, death, love, worship, and the elemental body’s movement between the corporeal to the spiritual through our body’s ecological realities and projections toward an unknowable future. Anh Yēu Em presents space, vessel, image, and the human body in presence and absence, as an installation for exploring reality and our place in the world. A mural scale drawing on paper, ceramic totems, performance, and sculpture create the installation. Anh Yēu Em is man’s interior world processed through what is seen, what is lost, and what is to come in the ever-changing world.
Is to love ultimately to lose? And if so, is life ultimately the movement to become lost? Is the death the body’s memory of what there is becoming? Anh Yēu Em are the last words absorbing all the possibilities of becoming.
Anh Yēu Em is dedicated to the artist Lê Phuong Lananh (1993-2020) Revel in paradise among the myths of the world you loved. Rest in the minds of those who loved you though we may grieve in your loss. May we meet again.
Xxavier Edward Carter (born 1986, Dallas, Texas) is a transdisciplinary artist with a BFA from Stanford University and an MFA from Southern Methodist University. His work is presented as videos, publications, installations, and performances to encompass multi-sensorial and layered circumstances encountered by the artist. Personal interactions, media bombardment, observed and lived experiences, and material excess/waste influence his work towards a complex revolutionary promise. These are ecologically centered works often heavily linked to the material history of currency in how it relates to the histories of marginalized people. Carter is of Black and Native American heritage and views his work as a continuation of the survival and storytelling practices of these cultures. More broadly, he is interested in how these practices have analogies across cultures worldwide. Stories of origins, the afterlife, superhuman beings, and of love and tragedy are the most compelling for him. Carter creates work dealing with what these stories mean in an often violent and oppressive context and the power they have toward influencing revolutionary momentum. Carter has shown internationally at Peak Art, London, the Biennale art press des jeunes artistes, Saint- Etienne, France, MoT+++, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, France among others. He has exhibited with Cydonia Gallery and 500X in Dallas, and will present the inaugural exhibition in Erin Cluley Gallery’s Cluley Projects, opening April 17. A large-scale paper tapestry at the center of his 2020 Nasher Windows installation at the Nasher Sculpture Center, Start Livin in a New World, was recently acquired by the museum. Carter is a recipient of a 2019 Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, and a 2011 grant from the DMA’s Arch and Anne Giles Kimbrough Fund. He participated in the Dallas/Dijon Fellowship through Southern Methodist University in 2019.
Anh Yēu Em is brought to you with the help of the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture, Culture of Value Micro Grant.
