Selection from Technical Comfort, mixed media installation, 2018.

Technical Comfort
Dana Buhl
September 16 – October 18, 2018
Opening Reception: September 16, 6-8 pm

Reflecting on geological time: all that is required to produce the rare earth
minerals essential for computing.
Technical Comfort offers a space for contemplation of…
the history of air conditioning: the geologic process of the earth’s cooling
the water required to cool the “cloud”,
disjunction between the rates of information exchange
and natural systems required for such computing.

Secret Dungeon proudly presents Dana Buhl’s Technical Comfort. In this site-specific installation, Buhl expands upon her practice wherein found imagery and her own earlier work are used as material to be recycled, reconfigured, and represented. New meaning is found through a process of transformation, that is as delicate as it is calculated. New orders are formed that eliminate the hierarchies of media and one is lead towards the circulatory space from which the original images are selected.

With an interest in the slower natural systems of geologic formations, Buhl’s spare Technical Comfort sets the scene to consider and bring back all that may relate the haunting violence of escaping volcanic smoke, the moiré of the screen unearthing itself in print, and looping videos echoing the question, “Is it dying?”.

This sporadic gathering of images, objects, and video is a glimpse into the artist’s ongoing inquiry into memory, time, and the construction of systems.

Invisible labor, the natural world, and loss of memory … the cloud hovers in
the form of black towers.

Technical Comfort stares into the apocalyptic future. It searches for the uncomfortable relationship between the natural world and technology, labor both visible and invisible. Holding on to a selection of only a few recycled images, the artist, Dana Buhl, pulls together symbols as tools to marvel on both slow and fast time.

Emerging from/billowing behind the moiré

Buhl is an internationally exhibited artist who earned her MFA from Columbia University and is a graduate of the Whitney Independent Study Program.