'Quantum'
NHIA Sharon Arts Center
2.3.17 - 3.12.17
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| Bruce Dehnert. 'Quantum' Opening reception |
From a young age I was a writer. In being such a thing,
I came to understand that the characters with the greatest breadth of
complexity were the most interesting.
With a yawn, the simple characters were deleted as quickly as they’d appeared.
Never satisfied until I’d bequeathed characters with imperfect symmetries of
good and evil, by my teenage years I had begun to more fully comprehend that
this was a principle in the real life personalities of the many characters
living in my hometown. Their ‘stories’
seemed richer for it, as did my own.
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| Bruce Dehnert detail |
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My family was loaded to the hilt with devout
Episcopalians, whose passionate beliefs in Christian mythologies, on the order
of Virgin Births, for example, was equal only to the sheer volume of my early
doubts. With these doubts came the recognition of and appreciation for the
structure of their storylines. However, the adherence to a seemingly
unredeemable faith in the stories was alarming.
My grandfather was a carpenter. My father is an architect.
For a time, I worked in construction. I
am inspired by the function, aesthetics, and conceptual reach of Structures. In
this exhibition, the architectural-like structures serve to both support the
figures and represent narrative as construct. Like all mythologies or stories,
written or told from the ground up or heavens downward, their many storylines,
like an architect’s blueprints, intersect or form corners or infer the pathways
of rational thought.
All of the central characters of Shakespearean mythology
are vehicles for life’s great themes. Being voracious messengers for morality,
ethics, faith, and desire, some employ supernatural proclivities setting them
apart from us earthbound types. None of them can be regarded simply as “Good”
or “Evil.”
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| Bruce Dehnert. "The Fool." Earthenware. 23" x 18" x 18" |
