Dead Center State I

June Wayne
30 x 22 in. (76.2 x 55.9 cm)
Lithograph
Edition of 20
Bleed edges. Numbered, signed, and dated in pencil within image lower left; embossed with the artist's, printer's, and publisher’s chops. Lithographs printed by lrwin Hollander and published by Tamarind Lithography Workshop on Rives BFK.
Year: 1963

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1970; Far Gallery, 1969

SELECTED COLLECTIONS
Amon Carter Museum, Brodsky Center, Grunwald Center, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego) (Tamarind impression), Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, University of New Mexico Art Museum

SELECTED LITERATURE
Gilmour, 1992; Tamarind Lithography Workshop, 1989 (illus.); Museum of Modern Art, 1986; Baskett, 1969

COMMENTS
The figure perched on the shaft of light is a reference to the klieg lights at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, not far from Wayne's Tamarind Avenue studio. Wayne uses the shaft of light as if it were a solid platform on which a seated figure, shading its eyes, is trying to see where it is. Her penchant for paradox comes through: festivity, isolation, solid-seeming nothingness, a Kafkaesque plotline similar to The Hero or The Ladder. (Source: The Art of Everything, Robert Conway, 2007)