Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Placer County Contemporary Art - Kellen Dyer: BUILD-UP

Recently, at the Auburn 'The Arts Building Gallery,' Kellen Dyer, a contemporary artist, displayed some of his work. According to the Placer Arts 360 website, Dyer "grew up in Placerville, CA. He graduated from Chico State with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting." Most of his pieces focus on sleep and sleep disorders, such as sleep paralysis.

The gallery didn't allow many photographs of the artist's work, but I was able to get a picture of the set up for this blog. The gallery had coloured walls in a neutral gray which allowed the pieces to stand out, but not be overpowering. The mixed lighting of natural light and incandescent was a nice combination. The gray, cloudy light on the day I went emphasized the dream-like quality of Dyer's pieces.

Photo from Placer Arts 360
Dyer's pieces were done in a way that I've never seen before. They were acrylic painted on canvas with paper, wood, and metal. In the case of this piece on the right, the acrylic on canvas painting of the woman is set on top of a bed of crinkled, crumpled, torn paper that spills on to the floor of the gallery. The figure almost appears to be sinking into the paper, unable to wake herself to escape.

I found this exhibition pretty interesting. I didn't know that you could do so much with mixed media. The bounds of contemporary art are indeed limitless. An artist is free to use any medium to express himself/herself and may expand off of the traditional two dimensional canvas into the three dimensional world that we live in.

2 comments:

  1. Haha it's weird I find this a year later, um no metal in my artwork, but nice article.

    This entire series and more can be viewed on my website:
    www.kdyerartist.com

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    1. Alright. When I was looking at your pieces, it looked like some of it was painted on aluminum. Good to know!

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