The Other Side
A Solo Presentation by Brian Michael Dunn
Hamiltonian Artists presents “The Other Side” Brian Michael Dunn’s second solo exhibition of paintings at the gallery. It will be on view by appointment only from October 8 - October 26. All public programs will take place online.
In The Other Side, Brian Michael Dunn’s second solo exhibition with Hamiltonian Artists, Dunn presents a new group of paintings in his ongoing series of landscapes and still lives rendered in graphic forms and bold color. Drawing inspiration from print traditions including book illustration, textile and wallpaper design, and product packaging, Dunn’s work repositions functional and decorative objects into immersive organic spaces. The artist employs stenciled geometric shapes as standard units, which coalesce into such heterogeneous forms as luxury eyewear, butterflies, and halftone screens. Other images layered throughout the gravelly concrete and dense floral surfaces connote transient states of being (eggs, bones, an apple core), animal habitation (snakes, flies) and devastating production (bricks, chains, paper money and trash). The work is inspired by Dunn’s interest in Apophenia, the human tendency to perceive patterns and meaningful connections in random information. Throughout his work, the ordering of repeated elements points toward an interconnected significance.
Many of the works in this exhibition have an undercurrent of latent violence or extinction, as suggested by the character of littered remains. A bar lying in the red-hued rubble of After Us is the lone sign of human manufacture, redolent of both mechanical antennae and expandable batons. In Mt. Vesuvius, Dunn envisions a still life of every-day houseplants and ephemera the moment before they become artifacts, suspended in time.
Borders, barriers, and obstructions persist throughout the work in varied levels of abstraction. Most demonstrably in a large two-sided painting installation that fills the gallery’s storefront window and door, obstructing views into or out of the gallery. A continuation of Sheetz, Dunn’s ongoing series of painted sheet-metal re-creations of everyday objects, the assemblage of “newspapers” in the window operates as both object and image, distilling the broadside’s form into basic elements. The site-specific installation replicates a papered-up window much like those seen increasingly across the country—acting as both a barrier and an offering to passersby on the street—prompting questions about ownership, economic burden, and relief.
Brian Michael Dunn investigates pictorial abstraction through patterned landscape paintings and painted reliefs of everyday objects. Born in Milwaukee, WI, Dunn received a Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting from Boston University and a Masters of Fine Art from Cornell University. Dunn is a current Hamiltonian Artists Fellow and was awarded a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grant, a Mid-Atlantic Arts Council Fellowship to attend the Millay Residency, a Pollack-Krasner Fellowship to attend the Byrdcliffe Residency and the Ellen Stoeckel-Battel Fellowship to attend the Yale Norfolk Summer Program. Dunn’s work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the region including Hamiltonian Gallery (DC), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (New York), Mono Practice (Baltimore) The Reinstitute (Baltimore), Nudashank (Baltimore), School 33 (Baltimore), Automat (Philadelphia), Fjord (Philadelphia) Fordham University Lipani Gallery (NYC), Public Address Gallery (NYC) and Ventana244 (NYC).