Charles Dunn : depression

September 9 - October 24, 2020

We are currently living in a time of extremes; dualities such as black/white, red/blue, inside/outside are used to define our psychology/intuition. In the midst of all this action/inaction, we are either stunned into silence or shouting in the streets. Whether we stretch or drown, evolve or die, depends on the solid definitions we find ourselves clinging to, our style: curated, considered, and of course documented. Because nothing exists if it isn’t recorded.

Charles Dunn has been called a “vulture of style,” his earnest artworks the selected remnants from our cultural refuse. As we leap from one postmodern doggerel to the next, Dunn lingers in the in-between, creating works that breed new relationships of forthright honesty lacking in mainstream circuits. 

depression marks Dunn’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. His past exhibitions have been similarly titled as harbingers to a darker timeline. While we can dwell in the negative implications of hell on earth, demons, and bad years, we can also look to the transcendence of leaving the corporeal realm and embracing darkness as an escape. It is in the penumbras that we can find progress through failure or maybe just find yourself letting your mind wander a little longer off the page and into the margins where telling doodles live. 

It is “on the edge of boredom” where Dunn creates his works, where his use of layered colors blur the shapeless shapes and trades the objectivity of geometry for floating forms and “blops”. Acrid greens and oranges induce a warm seduction over disembodied faces, hands, heads, toes. Yellow becomes red becomes blue. The lines are there but there they are second to the forms, the colors, the washes. depression is not a declaration but a whisper.

The edge, the slash in between the melancholic/euphoric, the shapely/shapeless, the real/imagined. Dunn’s work doesn’t ask us to choose a side. It rewards us for staying in the cracks.