Forthcoming Show: June 28th – July 19, 2017 at the Hillsborough Arts Council in Hillsborough, N.C. Reception on June 30th during Hillsborough’s Last Fridays. More details in the post.
Come out and see my painting show Earth Memory: The Once and Future Paintings of Henry Dyer at the Hillsborough Arts Council in Hillsborough, N.C. The show runs from June 28 through July 19, 2017 with the reception taking place on June 30th from 6:00-9:00PM. I hope to see you there!
The Hillsborough Arts Council is located at:
102 North Churton Street,
Hillsborough NC 27278 map
(919) 643-2500
More About the Show
In this exhibition, presented in partnership with Forest Circle Industries, Inc. and the Hillsborough Arts Council, we gain a rare glimpse into the final paintings of Henry C. Dyer, the first child born in the Hopewell Colony of the Martian Valles Marineris and the first native, extraterrestrial human being. Dyer completed the work shown here shortly before the tragic events which caused the colony’s life support system’s catastrophic failure and an unfortunate end to the pioneering souls who were the first to to set up permanent habitation on the red planet.
Two years after the colony’s demise, the Virginia Reconnaissance Mission reached the site but was only able to recover limited artifacts from the heavily damaged structure located along a particularly steep precipice of the canyon. Among these objects was a flash drive containing images of Dyer’s paintings preserved in a sealed container located beneath Hopewell Minister of Information, Sora Yasusada’s, private residence. According to information found on the drive, Yasusada had commissioned paintings from Dyer and had produced an exhibition of the work for the Colony’s arts council.
Lost colony comparisons between Henry Dyer and Virginia Dare (first child born in the Roanoke settlement of what is now coastal North Carolina) is a well-trodden subject. What differentiates Dare and Dyer are the crucial insights that the late Martian painter provides into emerging psychosocial changes taking place among the colonists themselves. Dyer, having never witnessed Earth first-hand, created representations of that planet’s landscapes based solely on data that was available to him from personal computers brought by other members of the colony. His paintings reveal a sehnsucht for a place he never saw but was able to imagine from digital mementos ferried across millions of kilometers of interplanetary space by those who felt compelled to escape the troubling events occurring on Earth at the time. The official sanctioning and resulting exhibition driven by Yasusada’s efforts mark Dyer’s work as a watershed in Hopewell’s cultural development.
Forest Circle Industries, having acquired the Yasusada estate, undertook the meticulous task of reconstructing Dyer’s landscapes as you see them here from the files retrieved by the Virginia Mission. The varying quality of the images from the recovered flash drive produced a number of challenges to conservators in their efforts to render faithful reproductions of his paintings. Using sophisticated analytical tools, careful visual study, and fragmented source documentation, we feel confident that the objects presented here mirror as closely as possible the paintings and context that the Hopewell colonists would have experienced of Dyer’s work before they befell their tragic fate.
The exhibition was curated by Scott Latimore, Forest Circle Industries Coordinator for Digital Media Collections. Latimore holds a B.A. in English Literature from Warren Wilson College in Asheville, N.C. and an M.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. His creative writing and essays on artists have appeared in various publications. Additionally, Latimore maintains his own art practice out of his studio in Hillsborough, N.C.