|
ENCORE |
| INSTALLATION: |
SNAKE BAR, SAIGON 1975 |
| ARTIST: |
RODNEY DICKSON |
| DATE: |
Friday, March 24, 2006
ONE NIGHT ONLY REVELRY, 7pm–1am |
| LOCATION: |
Jack the Pelican Presents, Second Floor
487 Driggs Ave, bet N. 9th and 10th
Bedford Stop on the L Train |
| AFTERMATH: |
Saturday–Sunday, March 25–26, 12–6pm
|
| CONTACT: |
Don at 646-644-6756 or Don@JackthePelicanPresents.com |
FOR ONE NIGHTONLY, viewers to this installation, will be transported back to the week before the American pullout. For Dickson, who grew up in a violent Northern Ireland during the Vietnam era, the setting is loaded with a resonance both personal and political.
In April 1975, when the Communists took over South Vietnam, the Americans and their Vietnamese collaborators fled. Communist North Vietnamese officials, who came to run the South, settled with their families into these newly abandoned houses. Dickson's friend Miss Mai moved from Hanoi into a building on Dong Khoi Street that had formerly housed a Snake Bar. —This being the name, she told him, for bars where American soldiers went to look for Vietnamese women. When she arrived, everything was as it had been weeks earlier. The neon bar light and the fairy lights were still lit. The drink bottles were still there. Posters covered the walls.
Though Sunday, the aftermath of the Friday, March 24 revelry will remain untouched. Viewers will experience the strangeness of coming upon a site abandoned.
