Damian Stamer, a current MFA student in the art department in UNC’s College of Arts and Sciences, will open an exhibition “Southern Comfort” at Freight + Volume gallery in New York on April 12.
Freight + Volume is located at 530 W. 24th St. The exhibit runs through May 19. In the gallery’s video room, Stamer also collaborates on a project entitled “Down in the Den” with artist George Jenne, currently a teaching fellow at UNC who splits his time between New York and North Carolina.
The lush American landscape panoramas of the 19th and early 20th century were filled with idealization of frontier spirit and worship of the virgin wilds which existed in the pre-Industrial-age, gilded with American patriotic pride and romance. Stamer places himself firmly in this tradition, but brings that perspective abruptly into the present: from a political, personal as well as art historical vantage point.
Stamer’s reminiscences of his childhood in North Carolina, liberally inhabited by hay bales, barns and tobacco shacks, is as much about longing for yesteryear and simpler times as it about homage for the grand masters of sixties’ Abstract Expressionism. The paintings are as much about paint and canvas as any process/conceptual painter working today, but the twist is that Stamer’s work is not afraid to delve headfirst into content. The narrative is mysterious, rife with contradictions. Do these empty, dilapidated barns invoke a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max landscape, where Mega Corporations have devoured the land, blown up the earth and left just the vestiges, the husks of life? Or are these scenes indeed remnants of a bygone era, imbued with the artist’s childhood memories of his grandparent’s stories, floating in a dream space where reality converges into fantasy?
As Stamer explains: “Landscapes marry my form and concept by offering the biggest spatial trick of all, imbuing a flat canvas with infinite depth while simultaneously questioning how the physical environment I explored during childhood affects my identity formation both as an artist and individual.”
Stamer has received numerous international awards including a Rotary Ambassadorship and a Fulbright grant. He has studied internationally at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary and the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design, Germany. He has exhibited extensively in the U.S. and abroad. This is his first solo show in New York.
In the gallery’s video room, Stamer and Jenne collaborate on “Down in the Den.” This 5-minute HD video installation serves as a portal between two disparate worlds and invokes the uncanny disorientation of witnessing spaces that are simultaneously familiar and foreign. A minimalist basement den frames a monolithic video projection, a window into a southern gothic terra incognita that swings fluidly between lucid serene landscapes and the relentless detail of a grim microcosm underfoot. The work is made in the spirit of Jean Luc Godard’s decidedly low-tech science fiction film, “Alphaville” and the suburban grotesqueries of John Cheever’s short fiction.
The idea materialized out of a desire for the two artists to revisit the origins of their respective creative practices — exploring, as children, the backwoods of North Carolina. This time, instead of bubble gum and slingshots, they armed themselves with High Definition video equipment and set out to transform their native environs into a mental and physical space that is unnervingly alien.
Jenne has exhibited at numerous venues including Exit Art, PS 122, The Center on Contemporary Art, Jack the Pelican Presents, and Frosch & Portmann. His work has been reviewed in The New Yorker, Art in America, Time Out New York and the Washington Post. He is a former faculty member of the Rhode Island School of Design.
