PETER DYKHUIS
Peripheral Traces (Dark Heart)
FEBRUARY 5 - MARCH 1, 2014
OPENING RECEPTION: SATURDAY FEBRUARY 8, 2 PM
The Red Head Gallery presents Peripheral Traces (Dark Heart) by Halifax-based artist Peter Dykhuis.
These works began as collaged layers of paper-based ephemera -- such as personal lists, envelopes, invoices and notes -- that were organized into three categories according to their social and economic locations within the artist’s life.
The paper fields were then mounted onto clipboards and overlaid with squares of encaustic wax paint or the following image-patterns:
- weather-based graphics on the Home Front series;
- economic charts and symbols on the Work Force series;
- gaming/board graphics on the Art World series.
The resulting visual phrases document the material traces of a common life overwritten with emblematic references to larger environmental, economic and social forces.
Peter Dykhuis has exhibited in artist-run centres and public galleries throughout Canada and the United States. As a member of the Red Head Gallery he has participated in solo and group projects since 2004.
On the international stage, Dykhuis has exhibited at The Embassy of Canada in Tokyo in 1998 and installed Pressure Today at the conference titled Cartography and Art – Art and Cartography in Vienna, Austria, in 2008. You Are Here (Works on Paper) was presented at the Sydney College of the Arts in Australia in 2009. Early clipboard-based works were displayed in the exhibition The Art of Mapping, organized by TAG Fine Art in London, England, in November of 2011. Subsequent new work is in circulation in various group exhibitions in the United States. Peripheral Traces (Dark Heart) will be remounted later in March of 2014 at the AC Institute in Chelsea/New York City.
Parallel to this, Dykhuis developed a career as an arts administrator, curator and critical writer, first in Toronto and presently in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In August 2007, Dykhuis became the Director/Curator of Dalhousie Art Gallery at Dalhousie University in Halifax where he is responsible for its administration and programming.
