Click to see current work:  DAMIAN STAMER

DAMIAN STAMER   UNSEEN  WATERCOLORS AND WORKS ON PAPER

Durham — Damian Stamer/Unseen: Watercolors and Works on Paper opens at Craven Allen Gallery on Saturday, September 7 with a reception from 5 to 7 pm, and continues through November 2nd.

Unseen marks Damian Stamer’s first show exclusively of works on paper–intimate in scale, and expansive in scope.  The show features haunting landscapes and hidden interiors of his native North Carolina in various media, including watercolors and works which combine painting, drawing, and lithography.

Experimenting with perspective, images of the familiar may appear faint from a distance while their surfaces coalesce into chaotic lines. Constantly evolving technique, his process borrows from abstraction, minimalism, realism and sometimes trompe l’oil.

For Stamer, Unseen refers not only to this new body of work in a new medium, but also to the idea that “…these ruins also represent a past and present I too often did not see.  The centuries-old industries that brought many of these picturesque barns were built upon slavery, oppression, and denial of human rights.”

“I am shaken by an old barn’s history, yet I find beauty within it,” says Stamer. “Time is visible here.  Quiet moments near the sublime when afternoon light rakes the grain of a fallen beam, or cloud-like stuffing erupts from a rotten chair.  Violent and tender, this beauty hinges on the delicate nature of existence.  These remnants are, like us, soaked with impermanence.  We cannot escape a similar fate.  I depict these icons of the Carolinas not to monumentalize, but rather to question my identity embedded and reflected within them.  Nostalgia, sentimentality, naiveté, violence, loss, guilt, fragility, and complicity coexist, and can prove difficult to reconcile.  What else can I still not see?”

Stamer received his MFA from UNC-Chapel Hill.  Museum exhibitions include Altered Land at the North Carolina Museum of Art,  Area 919 at Duke University’s Nasher Museum,  and The Things We Carry: Contemporary Art in the South at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston.  Later this year he will have shows in the United Arab Emirates and Japan.

Craven Allen Gallery is located at 1106 ½ Broad Street in Durham.  Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday.  For more information, please call the gallery at 286-4837 or visit www.CravenAllenGallery.com.

DAMIAN STAMER

STATEMENT

I paint places close to home, barns and abandoned buildings.  As adolescents, my twin brother and I rummaged through rooms pregnant with secrets, inspecting forgotten objects in search of hidden treasures.  Moldy mattresses whispered of sex, drugs, and shelter from the winter cold.  Adrenaline of discovery often mixed with the fear of being discovered.  Even today, standing in these seemingly empty places, you never know if someone had been here twenty years, or twenty minutes ago.

I am undoubtedly comforted by this landscape.  However, despite my numerous positive memories, these ruins also represent a past and present I too often did not see.  The centuries-old industries that brought many of these picturesque barns were built upon slavery, oppression, and denial of human rights.  Although transgressions may be buried deep beneath the soil, some of the power structures that enabled them remain.

I am shaken by an old barn’s history, yet I find beauty within it.  Time is visible here.  Quiet moments near the sublime when afternoon light rakes the grain of a fallen beam, or cloud-like stuffing erupts from a rotten chair.  Violent and tender, this beauty hinges on the delicate nature of existence.  These remnants are, like us, soaked with impermanence.  We cannot escape a similar fate.

I depict these icons of the Carolinas not to monumentalize, but rather to question my identity embedded and reflected within them.  Nostalgia, sentimentality, naiveté, violence, loss, guilt, fragility, and complicity coexist, and can prove difficult to reconcile.

What else can I still not see?

ABOUT DAMIAN STAMER

Damian Stamer (b. American, 1982) received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Jacob K. Javits fellow in 2013 and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Herberger Institute of Art and Design and Barrett, The Honors College at Arizona State University (where he studied painting with Craven Allen Gallery artist Beverly McIver) as a National Merit scholar in 2007. He also studied at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts as a Fulbright grantee, and the State Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart, Germany as a Rotary Ambassadorial scholar.

Museum exhibitions include Altered Land at the North Carolina Museum of Art,  Area 919 at Duke University’s Nasher Museum,  and The Things We Carry: Contemporary Art in the South at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston.  In 2019, his work will be seen in exhibitions in the United Arab Emirates and Japan.

Damian’s contemporary paintings explore themes of memory and loss through formal and conceptual approaches. Detailed architectural forms reminiscent of his childhood memories of the South are combined with gestural brushstrokes that push and pull the images into existence. The artist lives and works in Durham, North Carolina.