To Purchase Contact PeepSpace
Statement
Dustin London’s work stems from an endless fascination with the flexibility and instability of pictorial space, and its potential for sustaining paradoxical states. Space is not the stage for an event; it is the event itself. Drawing is an improvised choreography where pictorial space is conjured from the interaction of paper, mark, form, interval, and void. At its best, a drawing reaches a state of suspension where spatial positions are slippery, form and emptiness readily exchange roles, and the image quivers with possibility.
London’s recent drawings on washi (Japanese handmade paper) are the result of time spent with the stone gardens of Buddhist temples in Kyoto, which offer ideas about arrangement and balance, compression and expansion of pictorial space, as well as interactions between organic and geometric elements. Each garden is a collaboration with nature in which humans must listen to the requests of stones, and understand the essential nature of trees and plants, in order to create a dynamic harmony that invites contemplation of the ever-changing relativity of all things, and not things.
Drawing is also an act of listening. Each unique sheet of washi has its own requests or suggestions, and will tell you where and how it wants to be touched. The paper must speak (or sing) as much as what is drawn upon it. Every time the pencil touches paper, any ideas must be modified, as each mark is made in response to the surface and anything drawn before. Sometimes a pencil becomes a divining rod, searching out the cartography of a shape, be it drawn or “empty.”
Bio
Dustin London’s work has been exhibited at venues including NURTUREart in New York, Untitled Art Fair in Miami Beach, Zen House Gallery in Kyoto, Heskin Contemporary in New York, Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, Holding House in Detroit, and TSA in New York. He has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, Millay Colony, ANEWAL Gallery KKARC in Kyoto, AiR Fukujusou in Kyoto, Willapa Bay AiR, Jentel, Vermont Studio Center, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. London is a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Drawing and his work has been featured in New American Paintings, Two Coats of Paint, Art Maze Magazine, Friend of the Artist, and The New York Times. He received a BFA from Michigan State University and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. He currently lives and works in Ann Arbor, MI, and is a Professor in the School of Art & Design at Eastern Michigan University.
PeepSpace 