THE CLEARING OUT SHOW STATEMENT
by Matthew Korfhage
Wynde Dyer began her career in 1998 as a documentary photojournalist, in the San Joaquin Valley where she was born and raised. After a childhood of classical art training under once-renowned Argentinian chalk artist Miriam Romano, photography became for Dyer a “rebellion against art” into the crisp objectivity of a lens. So her formative subject became Joan Didion’s sparse central California of desert and economy, where landscape is haunted by nothing but memory, the houses are solemn in the flats, and the swimming pools stand spavined and desolate.
Even in her painting practice, it is in photographs—rummaged from estate sales, recovered in antique-store “instant relatives” bins, resonant with history gone unstuck in time—that she finds her material. Her work takes its primary influence not from painting but from photography, with echoes of the WPA documentarians of the Great Depression, W. Eugene Smith’s humanistic photo-essays, and Matt Black’s classically framed rural California. But while these photographers focus mostly on figurative work, Dyer’s work centers on the implied humanity of manmade spaces when people are absent. An unknown home or stair or massive dam, lacking inhabitants, becomes inhabited by both viewer and painter, in a stasis that is foreboding precisely because it lacks the dimension of time; it is a continuing immanence and imminence of the human.
Dyer’s process-driven drawings and paintings are a matter of control and submission—whether between medium and substrate, memory and image, or accident and intention. In her mostly black-and-white landscapes and interiors, water may swirl the guache, smear the charcoal, or recast the texture of wood according to its own logic, but only within tightly circumscribed boundaries. It is almost as if certain parts of the picture must be protected from the unpredictable bleed of ink or graphite, just as the pieces themselves are delicate, often diaphanous and tissue-thin.
The grounds for living that Dyer depicts are also the metaphors we use to ground our lives; for Dyer, “dam” and “guardrail” and “diving platform” become visual embodiments of language; they are part of the symbolic undercarriage that allows us to create meaning at all. That is, these objects become meditative affirmations of what they have come to represent in metaphor, be it a plunge, a stopgap, or a transition. Her work affirms that landscape is always biography.
“The Clearing Out,” Dyer’s current show, includes works on paper created between 2007-2010. She lives and works in Portland, Or., where she received a B.S. in Communication Studies and Sociology from Portland State University in 2005, and completed coursework for a M.S. in Communication Studies in 2008. In 2010 after a more than a decade-long career journalism and higher education, Dyer abandoned notions of formal employment in order to better attend to her wellbeing and her art. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Wynde Dyer began her career in 1998 as a documentary photojournalist, in the San Joaquin Valley where she was born and raised. After a childhood of classical art training under once-renowned Argentinian chalk artist Miriam Romano, photography became for Dyer a “rebellion against art” into the crisp objectivity of a lens. So her formative subject became Joan Didion’s sparse central California of desert and economy, where landscape is haunted by nothing but memory, the houses are solemn in the flats, and the swimming pools stand spavined and desolate.
Even in her painting practice, it is in photographs—rummaged from estate sales, recovered in antique-store “instant relatives” bins, resonant with history gone unstuck in time—that she finds her material. Her work takes its primary influence not from painting but from photography, with echoes of the WPA documentarians of the Great Depression, W. Eugene Smith’s humanistic photo-essays, and Matt Black’s classically framed rural California. But while these photographers focus mostly on figurative work, Dyer’s work centers on the implied humanity of manmade spaces when people are absent. An unknown home or stair or massive dam, lacking inhabitants, becomes inhabited by both viewer and painter, in a stasis that is foreboding precisely because it lacks the dimension of time; it is a continuing immanence and imminence of the human.
Dyer’s process-driven drawings and paintings are a matter of control and submission—whether between medium and substrate, memory and image, or accident and intention. In her mostly black-and-white landscapes and interiors, water may swirl the guache, smear the charcoal, or recast the texture of wood according to its own logic, but only within tightly circumscribed boundaries. It is almost as if certain parts of the picture must be protected from the unpredictable bleed of ink or graphite, just as the pieces themselves are delicate, often diaphanous and tissue-thin.
The grounds for living that Dyer depicts are also the metaphors we use to ground our lives; for Dyer, “dam” and “guardrail” and “diving platform” become visual embodiments of language; they are part of the symbolic undercarriage that allows us to create meaning at all. That is, these objects become meditative affirmations of what they have come to represent in metaphor, be it a plunge, a stopgap, or a transition. Her work affirms that landscape is always biography.
“The Clearing Out,” Dyer’s current show, includes works on paper created between 2007-2010. She lives and works in Portland, Or., where she received a B.S. in Communication Studies and Sociology from Portland State University in 2005, and completed coursework for a M.S. in Communication Studies in 2008. In 2010 after a more than a decade-long career journalism and higher education, Dyer abandoned notions of formal employment in order to better attend to her wellbeing and her art. Contact [email protected] for more information.