Wyatt GrantParis London Hong Kong is pleased to present Dreamer Gets Another Dream, an exhibition of recent works on paper and sculpture by Wyatt Grant. The show opens on January 30th and continues until March 7th. In Dreamer Gets Another Dream, Wyatt Grant assembles a collection of recent work revealing influences from stories, cultural relics and everyday experiences. In a project that includes complex paper works and sculpture, he creates an assorted cast of characters — both figurative and other — that form the basis for intricate vignettes. The terms are written here in several ways. Using dioramas, pictorial narratives and abstraction, the project establishes an unlikely and mysterious mythology. Engaging in themes of displacement, humor, frustration and the supernatural, Grant exposes an interior state for each element of the installation. The material nature of the work in this show expresses Wyatt Grant’s active studio practice. Roughly assembled geometric compositions, stacks of collages, an inventory of preliminary studies and experimental objects are linked together thematically. There is an amorphous relationship between the parts and the whole; bonds are formed through visual and structural links. Those isolated figures that remain act as monoliths to create a divide between what populates a dream and how we ascribe its meaning. Dreamer Gets Another Dream works feels like a theater set populated by a peculiar group of actors. The compelling narrative that unfolds comes to us through inference and allusion. Interview with Grant
My practice is broken up into different modes that support each other on a larger scale- smaller activities like documenting thoughts, sketching, writing before bed, working in the studio, etc. It’s important for me to bring work together from all these different angles. At the moment I’ve been working from a few different places around the city. It feels disjointed, but it’s gratifying when you see a body of work take shape despite not being centralized in any one place.
A lot of work in the show was created through arranging a variety of archetypical characters and themes, some of which are totally made up and kind of tongue in cheek. I was very interested in the concept of the “dreamer”, or a person who seems impractical and romantic while somehow managing to play the role of a trickster in society. They’re kind of a foolish gatekeeper kind of character; this work was made seeing through this persons’ perspective, telling their story. I was influenced by The Catcher In the Rye and the movie The Master in their depictions of the protagonist. There’s a collage-esque approach that pervades most of the work which seems to be indicative of the dreamer’s sensibility. At the forefront, sort of myopic then arranged into a scene or something singular. The diorama-style works allowed me to isolate a lot of elements and put something together that, as a whole, was kind of out of my control. It simulates the narrative for me when creating spaces that I have yet to fill in. The title suggests that there’s a perilous state of excess for the dreamer sometimes.
The form a lot of my work takes is reflective of how it was put together or thought up. I like keeping that part out in the open and showing the sort of deliberation that occurs while constructing an image. Most of my projects start with drawing, either with a pen or black paint. I have a background in screenprinting layered images which required me to keep a pile of black and white images to be exposed onto a screen. The preliminary images that the process resulted in kind of claimed the final product for me mentally because they really had no filter. They were just playing their part as another layer cast in a scene. It loosened me up a bit and I’d like to get back to that feeling.
In high school, I became heavily influenced by the Royal Art Lodge, one of the members was Marcel Dzama and I’ve followed his work ever since. Narrative-wise, I like photographer Stan Douglas and how he inserts himself into imagined narratives, especially in his series “20th Century Studio”- the same goes for Jeff Wall and Cy Twombly. Everyday influences include Leslie Baum, Fraser Taylor, Cody Tumblin, Jesse Carsten, and Garrett Durant (all Chicago-based artists, at least at some point).
My main interests are still fresh from this show, still dealing with the same themes in my head. I would like to spend more time in the studio. Through making the geometric collage works in the show, I started to see a connection between the larger scale compositions and flat patterns so I’m likely to work further with those things.
They come from the same place, but the different outlets help me to digest things in different ways. I used to be pretty concerned with having to do one or the other since they seem like such different avenues or that they may dilute each other, but it fits very well for me. The link between the two is a habit of writing and sketching. A few of the works in the show share titles with songs I’ve written.
For young artists, I’d say that its important to love and trust your intuition, even if it sometimes feels unfamiliar or scary.
Click here for another interview by Make Space
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