Jason Dunda

Gallery Affiliations: Katherine Mulherin Cotemporary Art Projects

Region: Midwest

After several viewings of Wall-E and a couple of Discovery Channel programs, I consider myself an informed amateur on the speculative pseudoscience of the future. According to the near-facts told to me by the cable television, it is thought that it would take less than five hundred years for an uninhabited Earth to erase all visible traces of humankind. I am interested in our individual attempts to stabilize an environment that is in constant flux, and I aim to create in my paintings a strange and wonderful world in which we are foolishly powerless against our surroundings.

I depict landscape with collections of branches, logs, tumbleweeds, and scrap lumber placed by unskilled, poorly equipped personnel in deliberate, yet purposeless tableaux. I imagine these accumulations are the first attempts to post human installation artists, or perhaps the final attempts of the last humans, as if Jessica Stockholder were the protagonist in Cormac McCarthy’s post apocalyptic odyssey The Road.

I paint my imagery with an economical, graphic stroke and a limited but sophisticated colour palette. I aim to temper the weight of the subject matter with seductive color and brushwork, to distill in to playful near-abstraction the imagery of humanity’s last aesthetic gasp, a world of gorgeous failure and polite futility.