Routine Scenic Machine
Monique Meloche Gallery
September 9 - October 8
Opening reception Friday, Sept 9, 6-9pm

For his first solo exhibition at moniquemeloche, Dan Gunn (American, born 1980, lives Chicago), who considers himself primarily a painter, will make all new work including wall-based, free-standing, and hanging constructions. Simultaneously present and elusive, Gunn’s work elicits an awareness of the viewer’s own visual and spatial perception through the construction of objects that highlight the interconnected relationship between artist, viewer, and object. “I am trying to construct an indifferent object that has recently become the object of desire, yet leave it in that mixed state,” says Gunn.

Using the many languages of abstraction, Gunn builds a series of malleable surfaces that display different functional, aesthetic and cultural relationships between their constituent parts. However, for Gunn, abstraction is not used to reveal some underlying truth but rather as a way to notice the everyday structures that influence our relationship with pictures. Among other things, Gunn’s work examines our curious relationship to commercial display and the found object. In the artist’s words, “everything changes once it’s found, becoming involved in a chain of associations and symbolic appropriations. A rags to riches story.”