DeShawn Dumas - Future Primitive
May 31 - June 30, 2013
EXTENDED till July 14th
Summer Hours Sat & Sun 1-6 pm
Closed July 6th and 7th
Janet Kurnatowski is pleased to present “Future Primitive”, DeShawn Dumas’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show will run from May 31st till June 30th. Please join the artist for an opening reception on Friday, May 31st from 7-9pm.
DeShawn Dumas’s paintings incite the abruptness of non-illusionistic perception and the brute physicality of spatial experience. These self-described “vehicles” transmit haptic and durational sensations. Each “Vehicle” coaxes the viewer’s eye into moving back and forth, as the eye attempts to negotiate divergent surfaces and thresholds of perception. This energetic motion arouses a consciousness keenly aware of its liminal and binary existence: interior vs. exterior, private vs. public, motion vs. containment, text vs. image, fragmentation vs. totality and the self vs. the other. These bold visual encounters are materialized (incrementally and locally) through: the continual recurrence of rotating galvanized steel frames, layering of diaphanous vinyl, veiling of fiberglass screens and the entombing of pages from the King James Bible (particularly) Genesis and the Book of Revelation.
Future Primitive commits itself to the impossible possibility that art can liberate the mind, allowing it to, momentarily, step outside of life by immersing it in aesthetic contemplation. Without succumbing to the modernist mantra of “Arts” autonomy; DeShawn Dumas enthusiastically engages in a ritual use of explicitly politicized socialized and industrial material in an attempt to aestheticize a joyously dissatisfied psyche.
Dumas was born 1983, he graduated with a B.F.A from Indiana University in 2007. He received his MFA from Pratt Institute in 2012. Dumas will graduate with a MS in critical theory/art history from Pratt Institute in 2014. For more information or images, please contact the gallery.
DeShawn Dumas’s paintings incite the abruptness of non-illusionistic perception and the brute physicality of spatial experience. These self-described “vehicles” transmit haptic and durational sensations. Each “Vehicle” coaxes the viewer’s eye into moving back and forth, as the eye attempts to negotiate divergent surfaces and thresholds of perception. This energetic motion arouses a consciousness keenly aware of its liminal and binary existence: interior vs. exterior, private vs. public, motion vs. containment, text vs. image, fragmentation vs. totality and the self vs. the other. These bold visual encounters are materialized (incrementally and locally) through: the continual recurrence of rotating galvanized steel frames, layering of diaphanous vinyl, veiling of fiberglass screens and the entombing of pages from the King James Bible (particularly) Genesis and the Book of Revelation.
Future Primitive commits itself to the impossible possibility that art can liberate the mind, allowing it to, momentarily, step outside of life by immersing it in aesthetic contemplation. Without succumbing to the modernist mantra of “Arts” autonomy; DeShawn Dumas enthusiastically engages in a ritual use of explicitly politicized socialized and industrial material in an attempt to aestheticize a joyously dissatisfied psyche.
Dumas was born 1983, he graduated with a B.F.A from Indiana University in 2007. He received his MFA from Pratt Institute in 2012. Dumas will graduate with a MS in critical theory/art history from Pratt Institute in 2014. For more information or images, please contact the gallery.