Artist Bio

RORSCHACH TALES
Duston Spear's most recent series of paintings, 'Rorschach Tales' will make up her third solo exhibition with STRNY (September - October 2009). In these works Spear has combined the applied graffiti of 'Read',(2005), with the iconic imagery of 'Delivered', (2007) and added the narrative intent of Japanese scroll paintings to assemble a codex of fictional battles. Miniature warriors fill the flattened scene charging on yellow grounds, the thin blue horizon line marks the ageless conflict below. The center of each canvas is dominated by a Rorschach-like form filled with her old paint clothes stenciled with words that are unreadable in this palimpsest incarnation. Tiny figures are curved out of cut up paintings and collaged onto the surface- horses rear, bulls race across the stage, archers toss their painted arrows, battalions of warriors shoot spray paint from their rifles at the unknown Rorschachian thing that stales the armies. The scene is frozen in it's activity, the site is abstract in its figuration.

READ
Duston Spear's 2005 series, READ, is a play on the red color that connects the works and the duality of that word, how it's meaning is determined by the context- present or past tense. These palimpsest-type paintings were inspired by the graffitti Spear encountered during her residency at the American Academy in Rome last March. Three of these large works, first painted in 2002, are based on Stephen Crane's poetry, where the artist filtered her responses to an impending war through his cautionary verses, letting certain words rise to the surface through the paint and burying others. Two years later Spear returns to these paintings, ('War Night', 'We Patriots Slave') vandalizing her own work as a way of shouting a louder warning to the viewer.