NYAB Event - Duston Spear "Floating World"

Duston Spear "Floating World"

Sara Tecchia Roma New York

This event has ended.

Duston Spear's new series, Floating World, works to contain the epic battles fought on each canvas through collaged oil paintings and work clothes, spray paint, and wax on canvas. Her legions of warriors are conscripted into service in this internal civil war; foot soldiers, horse men and archers form battalions locked in close combat. In this, her personal theater of war, the figures align as a contemporary History Painting within a narrative embodying a social message of recent past. From Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) to Barnaby Furnas' Hamburger Hill (2002), Spear elevates her own social ideals through historical events within the borders of this grand genre. She follows in the tradition of creating beauty out of certain destruction.

Spear has collaged her warriors onto canvases by unsentimentally destroying her previous paintings, each one carrying its own individual biography. If "the life of an object reflects the history of its accumulated significances", the paintings of Floating World bely the visual and emotional history of Spear herself. After dropping out of the artworld in the late 1980s due to a medical crisis within her family, she re-emerged an artist filled with the chronicals of her own life. Like Lee Krasner before her, who used cut-up Hans Hoffman paintings in order to cleanse herself of her soiled masculine influences, Spear is never one to linger. She too cut up her own past and made a clean break of it in Floating World.