“ENCLAVES”
John Dempsey (USA)
& Debra Dow-Iwanusa (USA)
20.-30. September, 2018
GALLERI SCHAEFFERS GATE
Schæffers gate 5 • Sofienberg 0558 Oslo • Norway
http://schaeffersgate5.no
Vernissage: 18h-20h Thursday 20. September
Opening Hours: 15h-19h Wednesdays, Thursdays & Fridays
12h-16h Saturdays & Sundays
DEBRA KAY DOW-IWANUSA was born in Saginaw, Michigan and raised in Sedalia, Colorado. She currently resides in Poughkeepsie, NY. Her early influences were printmakers Peter Milton, David Becker, Helen Frankenthaler and Michael Mazur. Like her distant cousin Arthur Wesley Dow, Debra’s inspiration is derived from the bounty of nature with its varied and harmoniously balanced textures, colors and natural forms.
Her love of drawing led her to explore the medium of printmaking, which ultimately became her preferred method of artistic expression — the tools of printmaking a natural extension of pencil and charcoal.
DEBRA KAY DOW-IWANUSA – ARTIST STATEMENT
Born in the state of Michigan in the Great Lakes Region of the USA, my early childhood was spent in the rural northern area of the lower peninsula. My siblings and I spent many hours in the summer and autumn exploring the woods that surrounded our home. As an older child living with my Father and Stepmother in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, I once again had the opportunity to explore the forest. These early experiences nurtured my great love and appreciation of nature and the environment.
The first body of work presented in this gallery is my visual testimony to the marks left on the earth’s surface by the ravages of global warming caused by man’s willful ignorance and disregard for the environment in the pursuit of personal and corporate greed.
The second body of work on exhibit is a statement about the current US Government and the domestic and international political realities that drive the administration’s agenda – one that is the embodiment of the willful ignorance and denial of climate change and its subsequent effect upon the environment in the insatiable pursuit of personal and corporate greed.
– Debra Kay Dow-Iwanusa, 2018
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JOHN DEMPSEY was born in Detroit and currently lives and works in Flint, Michigan, where he has maintained a studio for over 25 years and where he taught painting, drawing, and design at Mott Community College. He currently is an adjunct drawing instructor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Michigan. His educational background includes a BFA degree from Michigan State University, and a MFA degree from Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington. He has also studied painting at Wayne State University and Arizona State University.
JOHN DEMPSEY – ARTIST STATEMENT
Our complex contemporary environment conspires to create a discontinuous experience of place. We occupy our environment sequentially, by immersion and over real time, temporally, spatially and causally. Moving through this variety of industrial,
post-industrial, modern and post-modern environments we work to resolve landscape and nature into an understanding of place. The work here at Galleri Shaeffers Gate 5 attempts to visually explore and chronicle this complex circumstance of place.
The work for Enclaves was chosen and made specifically for this exhibition. Enclaves was taken as an opportunity to follow through on a long planned project —translating a large-scale landscape painting into a tapestry. Magnolia Editions, Oakland, California, collaborated in its production.
In addition to the tapestry the work focuses on our indusrtrial environment. The factory is architecture reduced to its essence and I have always felt an urgency to record those spaces—particularly the ceilings of large factory interiors. In Enclaves watercolors are shown along with computer aided, laser-etched photos on Plexi-glas in an attempt to chronicle the feeling of occupying these rapidly changing and often vanishing industrial environments.
—John Dempsey, 2018
Schaeffers Gate 5 