Sawyer

A Solo Show by Dan Gunn
November 11, 2023 – March 3, 2024

Vernissage, an Exhibition Launch Party: November 10, 2023, 5:30 - 8:00 PM

Artist Talk: March 2nd, 2024, 3PM

Dan Gunn’s Sawyer exhibition showcases his practice in woodworking, ceramic, and paper collage. Through a nuanced approach to operating within the vernaculars of traditional craft and folk art, he wrestles with the romanticism, mythology, and nostalgia that pervades our notions of rural America and his own experiences growing up in Kansas. Gunn’s distinctive wooden wall sculptures, made to resemble draped textiles, are expanded upon in Sawyer with his recent Scenery series that includes wood carved relief images of flora and fauna set into idyllic countryside scenes of the American Midwest.

 

Gunn’s foray into ceramics is represented in two bodies of work that explore his reflections on personal landscape and pastoral kitsch. The Suitcase Act series recalls those sentimental shadow box assemblages that help anchor our memories to a certain time and place. The Ungrateful Son is a set of uncanny oversized ceramic frog lamps that replace warts with marbles that emit light.

 

Also included in this exhibition is Gunn’s fundamental work in paper collage alongside his iconic and monumental table-like sculpture Patchwork Plateau from 2011. Sawyer is accompanied by the book Field Guide for Sedimentary Time. Designed to resemble an actual field guide for studying rocks, the book contains reproductions of collages that Gunn made using images from a guide that was owned by his grandmother, a farmer, quilter, gardener, and amateur geologist.