CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/11/2018

Singular, odd and inspiring: Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away

Featured image, whose 262-word, profanity-laden title begins, "You're gonna die up there / Keep away! The sow is mine," and ends, "Why Dimmy?" is reproduced from Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away, the catalogue to the midcareer survey currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum, which The New York Times' Roberta Smith called singular, odd and inspiring. This particular work, whose title refers to a series of lines spoken by the demon in William Friedkin's 1973 film The Exorcist, is shown suspended within the domed glass atrium of the Museo Reina Sofia's Palacio de Cristal, in its original installation in 2015. It is comprised of more than 600 Pleistocene-era mammoth fossils suspended from the ceiling, all surrounding a single seventeenth-century ivory Christ figure. This work hints at the complexity, critique and play that characterize all of Danh Vo's oeuvre.