Artist’s Statement
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Flat Bow Rising, 2015, 34 × 23", Edition of 5.
My recent work contrasts soft, saturated color against near colorlessness, making the work both highly graphic and quietly photographic. The imagery is deceptively neutral: sheets of curled and folded paper, occasionally “printed” with elements that follow the distortions of the surface. The imagery’s simplicity is meant to allow us to see easily and clearly, but it’s also deceptive; colors shift and flux, and our precise perceptual abilities are called into question.
I am interested in how basic human desires cooperate with facilities of perception. I am trying to make an image that is seductive, but where the very thing that seduces us also deceives. Each image is a bit of a promise, a gift that never quite gives. [End Page 136]
Jeffrey Dell earned his BA at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and his MFA at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1998. From 1998–2000 Dell was a Fellow at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in Venice, Italy, where he worked and taught print and book. In 2000, he accepted a position in printmaking at Texas State University, where he is currently a professor. Dell shows at Art Palace Gallery in Houston, and at Galleri Urbane in Dallas.
