CM Dupre’s new series Alice will be featured at the new Art League Gallery space in National Harbor, MD from July 20 – September 5, 2010. Opening reception: Tuesday, July 20, 6:30-8:30 pm.

Who else has continued to lead such an eventful and fascinating existence as Alice? Compared to saints, heroes, screen stars, musicians and artists, intellectuals, inventors, politicians, she’s given us more: in elaborate chains of circumstance, indelible processes of redefinition, psychological growth and exorbitance. Her strengths arose from curiosity and imagination. There is no doubt that Alice IS—and more—she is transformation.

So the titles tell part of her story. “Alice is the Variable ‘X’,” “Alice is a Leaping Metaphor,” “Alice is the Deus ex Machina,” “Alice Is and Alice Isn’t”: clues to Alice’s potential and her increasing influence (initiated by the spell-bound gaze of Lewis Carroll). Her potential is step-by-step, beginning in childhood calculations, punctuated rebuttals, word-games, chance meetings, and entry into several worlds at once. They award her perceptions while creating her as virtual abundance—a hybrid artwork in an interrogatory space.

The second series takes Alice’s motivated forces further than self-identity and the Self as inscribed, as expression, as contour-context, or as a subject-summary.

Alice’s role goes on from a reality-fantasy condition that can begin to remark on the world through her infinite varieties and shifting shapes—that give her fame and fortune—onto different terrains, times, places, including for instance, the year 2010 of inclusion.

Her inner complexities become a sifting, sieving, filtering drama that stretches out beyond Alice in Wonderland, the proverbial Looking Glass, or Alice Liddell, flowing onto a world stage of reciprocal cycles and surrounds of meaning: the air that is breathed by others, cures found only in the unknown, in the shade of mourning and memory. Alice begins to search through living archives, finding in them an inconsolable poetics as she discovers varied replacements to the ‘unknowable sublime,’ presentable for now in the most compelling language of all, imagery.


Location: The Art League at National Harbor is located at 120 American Way, Oxon Hill, MD 20745.
Hours: Wednesday–Friday, noon–7:00pm; Saturday–Sunday, noon–6pm.
Exhibitions and events are free and open to the public.