In his short story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939), Jorge Luis Borges discusses the reproduction of a seminal text far removed from the historical and social context of the original. Menard, the titular character, channels his own experience to precisely rewrite chapters of Cervantes’s Don Quixote without directly copying the text. Of course, the Quixote as written by an early twentieth-century Frenchman carries far different meanings and connotations than the Quixote as written by a 16th-century Spaniard, and to Borges, Menard’s conceptual project invites a new manner of reading.

Discursive questions surrounding authorship and context lie at the root of Menard; the same have been contemplated throughout the history of art. As in literature, time is all-important: contemporary art exists in a Heraclitean swirl of discussion and context that is constantly in flux. With references to Giotto, Michelangelo, Morandi, and Paul Thek, among others, the artists in Dreamsong’s summer group show explore what it means to appropriate another artist’s work, either directly or slyly, wholesale or in part, and how distinctions between homage, facsimile, commentary, subversion, and criticism bend and shift, allowing the past to be ceaselessly reread in the present.

Untangling the narrative influences that led to Jay Heikes’s monumental painting Phantom of the underground (2023) is akin to playing a centuries-long game of broken telephones. Rooted in the German legend of Faust, Heikes’ painting leapfrogs more august retellings—Marlowe, Goethe, even Andrew Lloyd Webber—to land on Brian De Palma’s 1974 cult classic rock musical Phantom of the Paradise. In the film, a songwriter haunts a concert hall after a sleazy music producer tricks him into relinquishing the rights to his life’s work. Addressing artistic ambition, theft, and appropriation, the film’s perversion of classic narratives serves Heikes’ conceptual concerns. The artist’s depiction of a pivotal scene featuring a character named ‘Beef’ fiendishly laughing offers a wry commentary on the exhausting task of outrunning influence and achieving unadulterated originality. As Heikes writes: “Like Vincent Price’s laugh at the beginning of Michael Jackson’s 1983 phenomena Thriller or Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting The scream, the weight of an artist’s pursuit towards some kind of reference-free space becomes a cruel joke one plays on oneself.” Where Heikes grapples with the psychic toll wrought by the specter of his idols, other artists in Pas de Deux turn towards the past to illuminate work in the light of the present.

Moyra Davey’s film Forks and spoons (2024) directs her archivist’s eye towards a quintet of female artists whose photo-poetic practices focus on their own bodies. Davey weaves together reflections about her own life and work with that of her subjects’—who include Francesca Woodman and Shala Miller—building on these conflations by restaging their photographs and contrasting her own aging body with her subjects’ lost youth. The results, she notes, depend on her ability to exercise their ghosts: “My reenactments of the photographs of each resent. Artist have been mostly dutiful: predictably I only succeeded when I was able, mostly by accident, to leave them behind, decrepitude be damned.”

David Goldes’s work on paper Under the sheltering sky is part of a series the artist made after viewing the final paintings of Mark Rothko and Vincent Van Gogh in Paris last year. The drawing borrows its compositional structure and funereal palette from Rothko’s Black and grey series (1969-1970) while the depiction of roots is a nod to Van Gogh’s Tree roots (1890). A meditation on the possibilities foreclosed by each artist’s suicide, and a lamentation of global violence, Under the sheltering sky locates a tragic continuum in history’s tendency towards repetition and cataclysm.

Los Angeles-based artist Justine di Fiore’s diptych Undergrowth (2024) also locates a unique melancholic wisdom in an artist’s final work. Worked on until his death, Michelangelo’s Rondanini pieta (1552-1564) is an unusually humanistic sculpture of the Virgin Mary mourning the atrophied corpse of Christ. Di Fiore, who was a practicing nurse for many years, replaces Michelangelo’s biblical figures with loved ones and mirrors the image across two paintings in a manner that reflects her experience of providing care.

Any art historical inquiry raises the contextual question of how the act of seeing is modified by the passage of time. Considering the fractured way in which imagery is absorbed and understood in a digitally saturated and mediated reality, Kim Benson’s painting Tileset (2024) renders an image of a hand holding a palette from El Greco’s Portrait of the artist's Son Jorge Manuel Theotokopoulos (c.1600) through a highly textured surface layered with geometric shapes and grids. Employing both additive and subtractive strategies, Benson’s paintings resolve differently depending on viewing distance. Her approach reflects the way that history, time, looking and the process of making continually shift, affecting our interpretation, memory and understanding of images.

Ways of seeing are also central to JoAnn Verburg’s practice, and her works in Pas de Deux: After Fiotto (1983) and Four times three (2007), borrow compositional strategies from pre-Renaissance artists Giotto and Paolo Veneziano. In a single panel of the latter’s The coronation of the virgin (c. 1350), Veneziano simultaneously depicts two temporally distinct religious episodes, a before and after, in a single location. Seeing this painting led Verburg to construct her own polyptych with images made over four durations of time within a period of an hour or two. Like Veneziano’s polyptych, Four times three presents a reality that appears true, but in fact defies the dictates of time and space.

References to the still life genre undergird the memories haunting Pao Houa Her’s photographs and Alexa Horochowski’s installation. Her’s portraits of her mother’s silk flower arrangements reflect Hmong aesthetics and consider the materiality of cultural memory. In high-resolution black and white photographs reminiscent of Mapplethorpe’s iconic lilies and irises, Her reveals not only precise details of her subjects, but the traces of time in settled dust. Horochowski’s installation references Paul Thek’s The Personal effects of the Pied Piper (1975-76) in which the artist constructed a vision of the Pied Piper's secret campsite, with personal objects, mice, and a fire laid atop a Persian rug. Equally rooted in a memorable childhood event when Horochowski’s mother skinned, cooked, and served a hare for a campsite dinner after it was inadvertently hit and killed by the family’s car, Naturaleza muerta con una liebre (2023-24) also alludes to the use of the Patagonia region as a detention site where dissidents were “disappeared” during Argentina’s Dirty War. Vast and sparsely populated, seemingly isolated in time itself, Patagonia has historically embodied the character of disappearance (the Mapuche and Tehuelche indigenous groups were also driven from this land). The installation adopts the memento mori tradition of referencing life’s fleeting and ephemeral nature while evoking memory, family, violence, art history, and the land into a convergence of meaning and narrative that echoes across multiple temporal scales.

The appropriation of art historical references can open many avenues: commentary on the present through its juxtaposition with the past; the deliverance of beloved work from obscurity; the location of one’s practice within an aesthetic continuum; a kind of footnoting; a way to battle or concede the long shadow of influence. Sometimes it is done simply out of love and admiration. Ruben Nusz’s three diminutive distemper on linen paintings (each titled After Morandi) are semi-faithful copies of one of the singular Italian artist’s still lives. Their loose brushstrokes and subtly differing color schemes relate intimately to the originals as we relate to our closest friends, contentedly, quietly, walking two-by-two through the park. As Nusz writes of the serenity he finds in Morandi’s work: “The sun rises and falls, and the bottles still stand."