Inaugural Artist-in-Residence: Dustin Metz
Floor lamps by Dustin Metz
The Goldey House is pleased to welcome Los Angles based artist Dustin Metz as the inaugural Artist-in-Residence. Metz will drive cross country to stay at the Goldey House for the month of August. While staying at Goldey Dustin will focus on his lamp series. Metz creates a custom-made brass lamp to act as an armature, support and illuminator for a painting.
“My paintings have always dealt with the convergence of light, time, and space. Recently, I have been making paintings on custom lamps. Like an easel, a lamp base supports the painting as I make it—from start to finish—in a dark room, under a glowing bulb. The painting will always live in the light under which it was made. The Lamp Paintings come directly from my observations of the subtleties and specificities in how paintings are experienced. It is important for me to paint the Lamp Paintings under the light of the lamp itself, so that the raking light becomes one of the materials. “
“My lamps share a connection to the lighting mechanisms found in Italian churches. When you hit a switch (or deposit a Euro coin), the paintings that live in these churches are illuminated. They come alive. Similarly, my lamps are designed to light the painting directly, while maintaining the appearance of a normal house lamp, meant to live in a home. They are truly in situ works. They are quiet spectacles. The work becomes the light source in a dark room. When you encounter these paintings/lamps, the everyday subject matter becomes subversive. As I'm making these works, I want to elevate this subject matter and then follow its logic to an unknown place.”
“Reverence for the materiality of paintings has led me to ask: What kinds of objects or things can be revered? How does painting make those objects transcendent? To answer these questions, I often turn to fruit as subject matter in painting. I have centered fruit as a means to explore existential drama. Fruit is living flesh that holds seeds within its peel. Fruit is heavy, expectant. It’s familiar and daily but mysterious and miraculous. It’s not a coincidence that the fruit is painted with the interior light of the sacred. Implicit in this act is my relationship to painting as something quiet, daily, and transcendent. The fruit functions as a vehicle to explore my own feelings of awe around painting—how it is incomprehensible and other-worldly in the way it collapses time and space, image and touch.” - Dustin Metz
