Press Release
Everything and Nothing at Once: Still Life Paintings by Dustin Pevey
For this exhibition, Pevey depicts his studio at a standstill, expanding on a series of works that engage with objects and images pulled from his surrounding environment. Although flattened and fixed, the works are evocative of a deeply layered process, causing the viewer to contemplate the order of action in each accumulative gesture.
Large sections of Pevey's studio walls are adorned with an arrangement of objects from the studio to be photographed: paintings, details of paintings, photographs of digital prints of paintings, cryptic advertisements, knives, bandannas, and other junk-drawer detritus. The arrangements are then photographed, and digitally worked - often embedding images from google, his iPhone, or from the digital files of other previously made wall arrangements. Pevey then prints the file onto manually prepared canvas surfaces that he calls "textures" by running them through his Epson printer. Once printed, Pevey uses paint to manually obscure and redact sections of his photographic index. Throughout the process, shadows and traces playfully delineate space, implying relationships between each plane-each painting-and the next.
The various layers that constitute Pevey's process draw their context from mundane observations of everyday life: overlapping computer windows, advertisements overlapping the overlapping computer windows, a pile of dirty laundry overlapping the edge of a painting, paintings overlapping other paintings in the studio, etc. A small detail in one work might become the entire composition of the next and vice versa - in this way the work is self informed, cyclical, and creates a dialogue amongst itself. The work presents a confusing reflection of reality that is meant to be constantly questioned but never completely understood.
The exhibition will run concurrently with a show of new paintings by Tomer Aluf at 727 Warren St.