Dustin London

Region: Midwest

Website: http://www.dustinlondon.com

City / State: Ann Arbor, MI

Pictorial space is malleable, shifting, and subversive. I’m looking for a finely calibrated balance of idiosyncratic elements that creates a new, oftentimes paradoxical spatial proposition. Space is not the stage for an event; it is itself the event.

These works begin as self-generative digital drawings. Working in front of a monitor for long periods of time induces a disembodied state, a total immersion, where a sense of the tangible world is lost in a digital space that is weightless, without surface, consisting only of light. This world is then translated into the tactile reality of painting, often through a cumulative process similar to that of a dot matrix printer. Small, individual strokes or bands are painted in a regulated and mechanical fashion, forming gradients through minute striations of individual colors. These gradients become conveyor belts, moving planes of space with color. Multiple underlayers of contrasting color amplify and complicate chromatic relationships on the surface, creating an internal luminosity reminiscent of the screen, as painting chases the digital aura of the original image.