Dan Rule Neutral Ground

Dan Rule works mainly in drawing, prints, animation, and video. The prints and animations in the exhibition Neutral Ground share an initial interest and further tangential exploration in the word “Neutral Ground”; the evocative term for road medians in New Orleans. Immediately upon arriving in the city, Rule was struck by the term and saw it as humorously descriptive. Here the middle ground was accurately termed as the safe haven between two opposing factions of traffic. It was also a space for small sections of ‘nature’ made neutral by both their general acceptability and innocuousness. By living in the city longer, more associations and relationships with the term have informed Rule’s recent work, including historical, war-related connotations, giving him an interest in depicting a squishing of temporal changes into the same, shared physical space. The isolation of objects and concepts in art institutions, where the ‘white cube’ separates reality, creates an actual neutral ground.