Dylan DeWitt: Perceptions of the Everyday





































































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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