Trotter&Sholer is thrilled to present Capitol Babylon: The Narrative Falsehood of the Static Monument, a long-term performance by Leah Dixon. Dixon will spend five weeks in the gallery space at 168 Suffolk Street building an imagined government building and in process reverential structure – in the style of the Capitol Building, the Parthenon, or Stonehenge. The exhibition will open on March 26th with a landscape tableau of building and construction supplies that Dixon will spend the next month configuring into an imagined seat of strength and mythology. Her act of building is a physical representation of the idea that the systems of power, real and imagined, are dreamt and built by us.
The gallery’s large ground floor windows and a cordoned off viewing allow viewers to engage with Dixon and the documentation of her work. The viewing area inside the gallery is set up as a real-life venue for the umarell, an Italian term for a retired man who loves watching construction sites, often giving unsolicited advice with his hands clasped
behind him. In the project of nation building, we are often the umarell, but this large-scale work posits that curiosity and intercession are fundamental.
For Dixon, sculpture is imperative; the physical three-dimensionality of building is problem-solving in space. She notes that “the notion that we go anywhere that is a static place is a complete farce.” Like Theseus’ ship, physical monuments undergo change and renewal. By the time we see an image of a destroyed structure, likely a person has already started to remake it new, warping linear time with life-force. This drive to repair, to heal, is the building and evolution of culture.
The hyper-saturation of imagery in our current climate, for Dixon, has rendered illustration and two-dimensional representation as tools of false luxury and disempowerment. The power that these images held in the past, for example the close access war documentation that made the Vietnam War a “living room war,” has been diluted by a pervasiveness and ubiquitousness that desensitizes and fetishizes, rather than enlightens. The post 9/11 media reaction, and the creation of the 24-hour news cycle, has fundamentally reshaped our relationship to the two-dimensional image. Sculpture, according to Dixon, functions differently. It requires an understanding of the body and presence, and generates a place for functional failure to create new and beautiful space.
Capitol Babylon: The Narrative Falsehood of a Static Monument is an immediate performance of temporality; a reminder that change is constant. What sticks? What is reconstituted? Dixon’s process is spontaneous and reactive. Rather than a planned blueprint that could be executed by a team of assistants, Dixon is imagining the monument, building it, and experiencing her successes and failures in real-time. This is the practice of myth-making, the need to construct meaning and the ability to play with and dismantle what no longer serves.
Capitol Babylon: The Narrative Falsehood of a Static Monument will be under construction/deconstruction and on view from March 26 – May 2, 2026.
