Tony Cokes has designed this year's commission for Dia Bridgehampton, a video installation for the site that will also have an outdoor component through the Shinnecock Monument electronic billboards on Sunrise Highway in Hampton Bays.
Opening Friday at Dia, the two-channel video installation is a response to the Dia building and the property it sits on as well as the legacy of the art space's founder, Dan Flavin, whose fluorescent light sculptures are permanently installed upstairs.
Mr. Coke's work uses "appropriated and remixed text, music, and documentary images" that are incorporated "into videos and installations that investigate the interrelations of politics, popular culture, race, and identity," according to Dia.
Set on monochromatic backdrops, the text can function on a video monitor like a billboard while showing excerpts of writing, as if they were found objects from political speech, tomes of philosophy, journalism, and social media, scored to popular music.
Mr. Cokes, who is from Virginia originally and now lives and works in Rhode Island, where he is a professor at Brown University, is not associated with this area. Dia's director, Jessica Morgan, said he will offer "meaningful engagement with the rich and layered histories of the site while also prompting new, critical perspectives on Dan Flavin's work."
Mr. Cokes's work is in the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art, among others.
At Dia his work is reflective of the long history of the site, which was once a firehouse and a Baptist church. It also responds in color to the radiant monochromatic color of the light sculptures upstairs. The art, Dia said in a release, was "influenced by Flavin's palette and overlaid with texts from Dia's archive and publications that cite the history, transition, and development of the site, as well as scholarship on Flavin and Cokes's own writings."
It will be seen in projections juxtaposed at opposite corners of the gallery. Viewers expecting the typical "black box" presentation used for video art will be surprised to see natural light in the gallery, which will also be flooded with immersive colored light from the art. A soundtrack will include samples of "contemporary tracks from the Black diaspora that fuse soul, blues, gospel, and electronic music to cultivate, in the artist's words, a feeling of 'Flavin, fire, and gospel,' " according to Dia.
The exhibition will carry over to the billboards beginning tomorrow and through July 30, along with other periods during the installation. It was organized by Jordan Carter, a curator at Dia Art Foundation, with Emily Markert, a curatorial assistant.
