Dan Perkins lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from American University in 2013, and completed a Hamiltonian Fellowship from 2014 – 2016. His paintings play in the space between the natural and the digital, using tight geometries to activate planes, textures, and images. Recent exhibitions include: Best Kept Secret at the Geoffrey Young Gallery (2017), Romantic Destinations, curated by Charlotte Hallberg, at Crush Curatorial (2017), and Spring/Break Art Show: To See the Moon Fall from the Sky, curated by Will Hutnick & Mark Joshua Epstein (2017). His work is held in the collection of the Capital One Corporate Art Collection, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Katzen Museum of American University, as well as in many private collections. His work has been reviewed in Two Coats of Paint, Artsy, Bmore Art, the Washington Post, the Washington City Paper, and the Baltimore City Paper.
“In my process, I make digital and physical collages, and drawings as references for my paintings. The moments of representation present in the paintings come from a catalogue of images: some physical, some personal, many digital, both my own and from others. All the images and sources reference the natural world in some way. Often these images are edited or abstracted to a point of non-figuration.
The act of making these sources provides me a space to reflect on the nature of sharing and reproduction that the internet makes possible. For me, the paintings become playful meditations on how the internet is collapsing traditional spatial hierarchies: creating spaces that are often difficult to articulate, and strange to inhabit. These spaces have the ability to range through many different feelings of experience simultaneously: mundane, sublime, seductive, shallow, arresting, playful, etc.
In total, the work gives me a space to play with color, geometry, and image in a way that I find visually engaging and perceptually interesting, while also reflecting on the ubiquity of image that the internet now makes possible.” – Dan Perkins
Find out more about the artist: www.danperkinsart.com