Beginning Friday, October 31, 2003, Dia presents Streamside Day Follies, a new project by French artist Pierre Huyghe. Incorporating a short fiction film into a specially designed pavilion occupying the fourth-floor gallery at Dia:Chelsea, in this exhibition Huyghe continues to explore the role of ideological and semiotic systems in the formation of social conventions and traditions.

For Streamside Day Follies, Huyghe has designed an architectural folly, which becomes the setting for the viewing of his new film. The film projection begins after five supplementary walls have slowly moved across the gallery space to configure a jewel-like structure. When the film ends, the pavilion disassembles itself and the walls retract to their original positions along the perimeter of the space. When stationary, each conceals a small mural painting applied directly to the institutional fabric, which variously maps the locale of a new residential settlement, where the film is set.

Opening with a bucolic idyll in an Edenic landscape -- an evocation of historical representations of the Hudson Valley, Huyghe's film traces the formation of a burgeoning community hypothetically located in the valley today. A young family is seen relocating from their suburban home to the new housing development. For Huyghe, these two components limn a mythic kernel that is then instantiated in events that comprise a typical inaugural celebration, devised to forge a communal identity. Analogous to the way a musical score is brought to life in a concert performance, the third part of the film reprises the mythic template laid out in the first two sections.

Huyghe's multifaceted project employs a diverse range of cultural representations, garnered from nineteenth-century utopian social projects and Hollywood films, Disney animation and contemporary fiction writing, and romantic landscape painting, which fuse with an actual event: The celebration, which became part of the film, boasted a parade, costumes, fireworks, all recently organized by the artist in the nascent residential development that served as the prototype for his fictional construct, "Streamside Day Follies."

Exhibition Support
This exhibition is sponsored by Dior Homme.
Additional support is provided by Étant donnés and Marian Goodman Gallery, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.
An opening reception for the exhibition will be held on Friday, October 31, from 6 to 8 pm at Dia:Chelsea, 548 West 22nd Street, New York City. The exhibition is on view through January 11, 2004. Hours for the 2003-04 season are Wednesday through Sunday, 12 noon to 6 pm.

Pierre Huyghe
Since graduation from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 1985, Huyghe has had solo exhibitions at venues including the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2002); Neu Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2002); Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (2001); the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Amsterdam (2001); Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal (2000-2001); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (2000); Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark (1999); and Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1998). Huyghe's work has been represented in group exhibitions, including "Moving Pictures," Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2003); "No Ghost Just a Shell," at Kunsthalle Zürich (2002); "Animations," at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2001); "Regarding Beauty," Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (1999); "Premises," Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York (1998); and at Documenta 11, Kassel (2002); the Istanbul Biennial in 1999; the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1999); Venice Biennale (1999); and the second Johannesburg Biennial (1997). In 2001 Huyghe represented France at the Venice Biennale, and in 2002 he received the Hugo Boss Prize from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He lives and works in Paris.

Dia Art Foundation
Dia Art Foundation was founded in 1974. A nonprofit institution, Dia plays a vital role among visual arts organizations nationally and internationally by initiating, supporting, presenting, and preserving art projects, and by serving as a locus for interdisciplinary art and criticism. Dia presents its permanent collection at Dia:Beacon, in Beacon, New York; exhibitions and public programming at Dia:Chelsea, in New York City; and long-term, site-specific projects in the western United States, in New York City, and on Long Island.