Images
Both Sides
Cast paper
11” x 18”
2018
Cast paper
images of each side of a single sheet of copy paper
Blank Page
Colored
pencil on cut paper
11” x 8.5”
2018
Creases
Scored
drawing on bond paper
11” x 8.5”
2018
By Hand
Silverpoint
on paper.
14” x 18”
2017
Drawing of
a sheet of copy paper soiled with fingerprints, drawn at slightly larger scale
than an actual human hand.
Spilt
Water and
hydrophobic spray on concrete floor, paper cups
22” x 72”
2017
Cast Paper
Paper pulp
cast into a wrinkled form
8.5” x 11”
2017
Small,
Medium, Large Glass
Hand-cut
glass
31” x 14”
2017
Glass
fragments with identical shatter patterns at three sizes.
Cardboard
Carved MDF,
paraffin wax
12” x 18”
2016
Stutter
Inkjet
print on wrinkled paper, site-specific light and shadow
10.5” x 8”
2015
Wrinkled
paper printed with the image of the same wrinkles. Each feature is
presented twice—once as a three-dimensional structure and once as a printed
image. Site-conditioned print intended to be viewed in the same lighting
conditions under which it is created.
Rorschach
Inkjet
print on wrinkled paper, site-specific light and shadow
10.5” x 8”
2015
Wrinkled
paper printed with the image of the same wrinkles. Each feature is
presented twice—once as a three-dimensional structure and once as a printed
image. Site-conditioned print intended to be viewed in the same lighting
conditions under which it is created.
These
works present themselves as humble items, but reveal themselves instead to be
carefully constructed articles. What may appear at first to be the chaotic
results of entropy—wrinkles, smears, cracks, spills—are in fact painstakingly
ordered images. The game is to let the image remain as physically similar as
possible to its humble inspiration while maintaining whatever crucial
distinction is necessary to mark it as an intentional creation—a repetition, or
a scale shift, or a laborious process, or a medium that typically obeys other
rules. Or perhaps no such distinction is present, and the artifact is indeed a
mute fragment within a chaotic world.
Each
of us is confronted daily with this ambiguity between the incidental and the
intentional. In order to navigate the world, we are forced to distinguish that
which has significance from that which is simple happenstance. This same
ambiguity lends plausible deniability that veils passive-aggressive or
malevolent behavior. But it also gives space for playful games of courtship.
And allows both the faithful and doubtful to view the same universe and draw
their conclusions.
In
posing these visual riddles, conundrums with indefinite boundaries, I hope to
unsettle viewers’ assumptions about what they’re supposed to see when looking
at the world so that we may question the distinctions between artworks and
other objects, between messages and coincidences, between images and mute
facts.
Bio
Dylan DeWitt investigates the unusual, the
everyday, and the puzzling territories in between. His interdisciplinary works
aim to provoke heightened perceptual states in viewers. Dylan holds a BFA in
Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA in Painting and
Printmaking from Yale University. Recent exhibitions include Lines of
Thought at CICA Museum in Gimpo, South Korea, Interrupted at Mint
Gallery in Atlanta, Drawing Discourse at the Cooke Gallery in Asheville,
NC, The Contemporary Print at Flatbed Press in Austin, and Paradox at Spark Gallery in Denver. His work also appears in New American
Paintings #136. Dylan taught at the Rhode Island School of Design before
joining the faculty at the University of Arkansas School of Art, where he is
currently Clinical Assistant Professor of Drawing.
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