Simon Denny
Double Canvases
Double Canvases
April 05 - May 05 2025
Bill’s PC is honoured to present Double Canvases, by Simon Denny. The exhibition consists of two Double Canvas works from Denny’s Introductory Logic Video Tutorial project, which were initially presented at Artspace, Sydney, in 2010.*
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[*] In 2010, whilst undertaking a residency at Artspace (Sydney), Denny enrolled in an introductory short course in philosophical logic at the nearby university and translated some of the content of the course into a series of “videos”. Using a graphic interface borrowed from generic sources such as DVD menus and academic textbooks, Denny created a “video tutorial” that played out across a series of eighteen “monitors” - representing Artspace’s entire inventory of equipment capable of presenting video and serving as a record of the display hardware of the institution.
Extending the language of his earlier Video Aquariums and Drunken Videos; Denny employed the same production strategy he had developed the previous year for his ‘Multimedia Aquariums’, — assembling each “monitor” from two identical canvases printed with a 1:1 scale image of the front of a television or video display, attached with steel rods cut to the depth of the particular piece of equipment depicted.
The “video installation” presented at Artspace included no actual video or moving image. Rather, each “screen” displayed a single teaching point concerning logic, superimposed atop a background photo of the desert in Australia’s picturesque Mungo National Park. Despite Denny’s considerable effort to travel to the remote desert location to take the photographs himself, in the end they resemble the kind of generic stock photography we associate with your run of the mill click-to-add screen savers or desktop wallpaper.
This tension or oscillation between the universal and the specific was central to the exhibition as a whole. By taking an abstract system of philosophical reasoning that functions irrespective of content and redeploying it as content, Introductory Logic Video Tutorial creates a display in which form and content collapse into one another.
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Simon Denny (b. 1982 Auckland, New Zealand) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He makes artworks that unpack stories about technology using a variety of media including painting, web-based media, installation, sculpture, print and video.
Recent solo exhibitions include Petzel Gallery, New York (2024); Dunkunsthalle, New York (2024); Kunstverein Hannover, Hannover (2023); the Gus Fisher Gallery (University of Auckland), Auckland (2022); Outernet, London (2022); Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg (2021); K21– Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2020); the Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania (2019); MOCA, Cleveland (2018); OCAT, Shenzhen (2017); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels (2016); Serpentine Galleries, London (2015); MoMA PS1, New York (2015); Portikus, Frankfurt (2014) MUMOK, Vienna (2013); Kunstverein Munich, Munich (2013).
Denny represented New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.
He co-founded the artist mentoring program BPA//Berlin Program for Artists and has served as a Professor of Time-Based Media at The Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg.
