Dean McCrillis

Nov. 29 - Jan. 17
Artist Talk: Thurs., Jan. 8, 6pm

FEATURED ARTIST

Featured

Dean McCrillis (Current)

Dean McCrillis (born 1990) is Maine based artist, curator and outdoorsman.

We’re proud to present Dog Years, a solo exhibition of oil paintings by emerging artist Dean McCrillis created during his Cove Street residency. This body of work is accomplished and compelling, in its luscious paint and vivid palettes and also in the skill and subtlety with which the artist uses fragmented vignettes from his personal history to evoke the profound and universal experience of being human: moments of feeling exuberantly alive, distinct from and yet part of all that is, of love, death, loss and, as we age, a realization of and appreciation for the bittersweet beauty of impermanence.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Dog Years: A presentation of recent paintings that explore personal and profound connections to formative spaces. This body of work is a recognition of the ephemeral, and of a fundamental sense of interconnectedness to a place, its people, flora, and fauna

The woods and waters of Western Maine serve as a backdrop for this group of pictures, as it holds the deepest love and connection of any area I have known. However, with the passing of time, and an ever-growing distance between my present station in life and the tributaries of my youth, I feel a sense of yearning for this place that shaped me.

I connect to these foundational spaces through my process, paying homage to a way of life lived slightly closer to the earth, and to the awe-inspiring natural beauty of a geographic region of personal and ancestral significance. Through the act of painting, real memories and imagined spaces can coalesce. Earth tones and fluorescent paint can entwine, holding space for one another at the same time.

Invoked throughout is an acknowledgment of Jim Harrison’s poetic insights on how we spend our lives immersed in the richness and immediacy of living, barely aware of the passage of time and the constant state of flux in which we and everything around us exist. These works lean into the paradox of how our memories and sense of self are eternally bound to, though continuously flung further from, an ever-expanding chain of ephemeral experiences.

~ Dean McCrillis