Artist Statement
Dylan Humphreys
Sunday April 30, 2023
I am an artist that is driven by an inveterate relationship to drawing; my technique with images has been immutably influenced by the craft of traditionally “low art” mediums such as comic book illustration, animation, as well as the cinematic arts. I study the boundaries of humour, including it’s intersections with tragedy. Satire, irony, parody, and gallows humour are utensils that I personally assemble in order to digest my sensation of the human experience. Images happen to be how I am most suited to articulating those concepts, and I am attentive to how my artistic practice might stimulate mutual processes of catharsis and affirmation in my audience.
In painting I pursue hybrid combinations of it’s historical dialogue along with it’s seemingly unlimited potential. The work embodies a strengthening of my collaboration with body and mind; ideas of mental health, spirituality, neurology and philosophy are habitually imbued within my research and realization. I recurrently negotiate the polarity between automatic or spontaneous imagery, in contrast to the more methodical, and clearly representational aspect. Allowing the decisions to sometimes contradict each other and move along an ethos of intuition opens up more possibility for interpretation and prosaic readings, and symbolizes a speculation of verisimilitude.
I often examine scale; such as the materialization of intentionally monumental works that embody the traditionally idealized execution of painting, as well as ultra small works that explore my relationship to the body and can be said to represent a more social dimension. The latter is influenced by my living in the contentious land of “Vancouver”.
Currently I am in pre-production of projects that introduce technical abilities developed in my career within the film industry into my fine art practice. As a scenic artist, illustrator, set painter, storyboard artist, and art department employee, I now have a strong background of working disciplines that I am eager to employ in the creation of sculptures, videos, installations, public art, and of course paintings.
I have a theory, that my practice of art is something I intuitively absorbed as a means of effectively gestating certain events in my childhood that are categorized as, “capital T traumas”, including a life threatening assault and brain injury. I am a living probe of brain plasticity, and I am an expression that the true value of the arts is embodied in it’s sensation, execution, and enjoyment by the entire form of society; not the chosen few.