Autonomy of a Vacant Stare
Dustin Pevey
21 Sep. – 16 Nov. 2019
Future Gallery is proud to present Autonomy of a Vacant Stare a solo exhibition of new work by the Marfa,TX-based artist Dustin Pevey.
While one might catch a glimpse of a thing in the distance that affirms its existence and therefore its authority as a thing of fact, there remains always a mystery that as we gradually approach is constantly shifting to its details.
In his work Pevey utilizes this mystery by allowing it to exist in a liminal space where it is never fully realized for what it used to be. The vacant gaze, in Pevey’s work, is the point of departure; perception in the threshold, where its indefinable meeting points constitute the perimeters of the intricate forms that characterize the work. What lies behind the bones of a representative image? What are these bones made of?
Eliminating context and referents from images that previously held a specific relationship to the world, in a sense, negates that relationship and reduces the original to its purely formal qualities. What is left is a kind of ghost image composed from the detritus of what it once was. Everything becomes nothing, or better, everything comes out of nothing. The strength of Pevey’s work, of his stratifications to the bitter end, consists in holding all this together so as to make the nothing obtained poetic through compositions that intercept the shapes, lines and colors that make up the saturated world of images.
-Domenico de Chirico
