The Chewing Gum Table, 2008

Object: A High School Desk with two Chairs and Chewing Gum.

Exhibited at Deadpan Exchange III, The Lab, San Francisco.

The forgotten and hidden gum which resides under all high school class-room tables, grows into something more ominous beneath a desk from South San Francisco High School. The piece is made in reaction to Susan O'Malley's intervention project "The Doodle Contest" at Branson High School in Marin, California.

The Deadpan Exchange III is organized by Jonn Herschend and is featuring the work of the Danish artists: Marie Kolding Lund (DK), Gudrun Hasle (DK), Jacob Borges (DK), Jesper Carlsen (DK), Jens Axel Beck (DK), Morten Kær (DK), and Heidi Hove Pedersen (DK).

The Deadpan aesthetic usually requires a straight-faced delivery of information. In most cases the information being delivered boarders on being dead serious to completely absurd, but the deliverer of the information must maintain a stone-faced composure. Think of Buster Keaton, Martha Rosler, or Bas Jan Adar. There is a beauty to the humanity in this because the information involved has elements of both comedy and tragedy, and the viewer has to decide which way to go.

The work presented by the seven Copenhagen based artists of the Koh-i-noor collective is the third part in a series of international deadpan exchanges, which began in the summer of 2007 in Denmark and Berlin. In each of the shows, the artists were actively involved in a give and take of deadpan communication… a sort of classic comedy exchange. The work exhibited at the Lab by the seven Danish artists is a reaction to the work of the Bay Area artists who initially exhibited in June 2007 in Copenhagen: Jimmy Chen (US), Alex Clausen (US), Kara Hearn (US), Jonn Herschend (US), Susan O'Malley (US), Will Rogan (US), and Ryan Thayer (US).

While the Deadpan Exchange series serves as a means of exploring deadpan communication on an international scale, it also serves as a way to bring diverse groups of artists together from different places in the world and begin a dialog that might not otherwise take place outside of formal institutions.

Text by: Jonn Herschend (US).

The Deadpan Exchange series are organized by Jonn Herschend (US) and Heidi Hove Pedersen (DK).