The Role of Color in Abstract Art: Beyond the Palette
Art Sloth Insights
“Abstract artists challenge viewers to see color as a communication mode. This shifts its role from mere aesthetics to conveying emotions and ideas. Audiences become active participants in creating meaning, fostering introspection and dynamic interplay between artwork and viewer.”
Just a Rumor
2023
acrylic on panel
20 in. x 16 in.
The Evolution of Modern Art: From Kandinsky to Today
Just a Rumor
2023
acrylic on panel
20 in. x 16 in.
Art Sloth Insights
“Art has always been a reflection of its time, capturing the cultural, social, and technological changes that define an era. Modern art, emerging in the late 19th century and evolving through the 20th and 21st centuries, has been a journey of innovation and reinvention. It shattered the conventions of traditional art, introduced abstraction, and opened up boundless possibilities for creative expression. From early pioneers like Kandinsky and Picasso to today’s digital art revolution, the evolution of modern art tells a story of bold experimentation and profound transformation.”
Art Sloth Magazine Vol 2
Modern Makers
In his decades-spanning practice, Michael Dwyer has focused on making abstract paintings that places colour, front and centre. Drawing inspiration from music, architecture, and modernist influences, Dwyer creates improvisational compositions that feel alive with rhythm and direction. Crisp-edged bars of translucent colour zigzag, float, and collide across his canvases, revealing layers of earlier decisions beneath the surface—each piece a visual record of its own evolution. His work explores the tension between control and improvisation, inviting viewers to follow the visual pathways he builds across the surface. Dwyer earned an MFA from the University of South Carolina and a BFA from Syracuse University. His work has been in numerous juried exhibitions. Most recently Dwyer’s work was included in the exhibition “This is the Future of Non-Objective Art!” presented by Atlantic Gallery.
The Jasper Gallery at Motor Supply Co. Bistro Welcomes the Art of Mike Dwyer
Meet the Artist
Friday, July 15th @ 7 pm
in the Bistro Bar
In the Jasper Project’s continued efforts to facilitate the exhibition of the art of Midlands-based artists on Columbia’s public walls we welcome the work of Michael David Dwyer to Motor Supply Co. Bistro at 920 Gervais Street in Columbia’s historic Congaree Vista.
In his decades-spanning practice, Michael Dwyer has focused on making abstract paintings that place color front and center. His recent work deploys crisp-edged chunks of translucent color that meander, zigzag, or float through the composition. The paintings are improvisational structures that often reveal evidence of their evolution.
Dwyer holds a BFA from Syracuse University and an MFA from the University of South Carolina. His work has been exhibited in Syracuse, Providence, and various cities in South Carolina. Most recently, Dwyer's work was included in the exhibition The Shape of Things at 701 Center for Contemporary Art.
Dwyer says, “As a kid, I was surrounded by modern art at home - mostly my father’s paintings. I loved visiting my dad's studio. I liked the spattered dishevelment, the smell of paint, and the paintings that I couldn't fully understand, but instinctively grasped, as the works came to life. I knew at an early age that making art was something I wanted to pursue.
“A sense of movement has been an important element in my work for many years. Earlier pieces often conveyed a feeling of forms drifting in space. Then there was a shift toward using linear compositions to create direction. I wanted your eye to move along a variety of paths and have experiences along the way. My paintings relate to movement, physically, but also as it exists in music. I also found from my earlier collage work that I like shapes in my paintings to have crisp, assertive edges, like those that came from using scissors. Pieces are sometimes informed by elements of our environment like billboards, architecture, and graffiti. Ultimately, I’m always chasing that transcendent moment where color, shape, and movement come together in a way that‘s thrilling and right.”
The Artist - Michael Dwyer
The show opens on Tuesday July 12th with an invitation to Meet the Artist on Friday, July 15th in the bistro bar at 7 pm.
701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, S.C., presents The Shape of Things
For its first exhibition of 2020, 701 Center for Contemporary Art in Columbia, S.C., presents The Shape of Things, with work by 13 artists from South Carolina. The exhibition will run from January 16 – March 1, 2020, and will open with an artists’ reception on Thursday, January 16, 7:00 – 9:00 pm.
The artists in the exhibition are Daniel Bare (Central), Nick Boismenu (Columbia), Mark Brosseau (Greenville), Sharon Campbell (Travelers Rest), Betsy Chaffin (Okatie), Mike Dwyer (Columbia), Tolulope Filani (Orangeburg), Morgan Kinne (Charleston), Liz Rundorff Smith (Greenville), Melissa Stang (Columbia), Kathleen Thum (Central), Brittany Watkins (Columbia) and John Wright (Estil).
The Shape of Things, curated by 701 CCA board chair Wim Roefs, is an exhibition defined visually by artworks with distinctive shapes that as a group occupy an area where abstraction and representation meet. Some of the work has clear representational elements but on certain levels can read as abstract or even non-objective. Other works are mostly abstract but trigger associations with the representational world. The exhibition plays with the relative nature of abstraction and non-objectivity on the one hand and representation and figuration on the other. The exhibition shows that the lines between abstraction and representation are not always drawn sharply, both conceptually and visually. As such, the exhibition also suggests that formal and aesthetic choices do not predetermine or preclude conceptual concerns, and vice versa.
“John Wright’s black-and-white work featuring a cross shape, for instance, can as easily be discussed within the context of, say, the work of one of the 20th century most important abstract painters, Kasimir Malevich, as within the context of race relations in the U.S. South and the role of religion in those relations,” Roefs said. “Morgan Kinne’s drawings of building facades obviously have a strong representational element but, aside from being abstracted, at the same time draw attention to the facades’ overall shapes, which can be read as abstract. Mike Dwyer’s paintings seem entirely non-objective, but his titles suggest that the work can be read as perhaps poetic renderings of not-so-abstracted realities. Daniel Bare and Nick Boismenu, both ceramicists, use clearly representational objects to create larger works that gravitate toward abstraction. And in Brittany Watkins’ work, representation and
non-objectivity literally meet and go hand-in-hand when she uses cushion covers to create the main shape in some of her works.”
The Shape of Things confirms 701 CCA’s important role in highlighting some of the best contemporary art in the state. In addition to the biennial 701 CCA Prize for South Carolina artists 40 years and younger and the 701 CCA South Carolina Biennial, the center regularly presents group and solo exhibitions of contemporary artists working in the state. “Our mission is not specifically to focus on South Carolina artists,” Roefs said, “and we show artists from elsewhere in the United States and abroad. But we do think it’s important to provide a platform for good contemporary art made in South Carolina, both for the public’s and the artists’ sake. The public otherwise would hardly ever see the work by many of those artists, while the artists seldom get to exhibit in venues with a statewide range.” “Through exhibitions like this and the 701 CCA Prize and the South Carolina Biennial,” Roefs said, “701 CCA has dramatically improved the art infrastructure in South Carolina. The center easily is the most important art venue for South Carolina contemporary art.”
#
701 CCA’s mission is to promote understanding, appreciation and enjoyment of contemporary art. With a gallery and live-work space for an Artist-in-Residence program, the Center provides artists with resources to develop, create and exhibit visual arts in conjunction with performing, literary and media arts. 701 CCA also offers year-round cultural programming, including contemporary art exhibitions and events that are free and open to the public. For further inquiries or high-resolution images, contact Allison Cicero Moore, Executive Director, at director@701cca.org or (803) 319-9949. Please check 701 CCA’s website for additional information on the exhibition and associated events. 701 CCA is located at 701 Whaley Street, 2nd Floor, Columbia, SC 29201. During exhibitions, hours are Wed-Sat, 11–5; Sun, 1-5.
Essay by Catherine Walworth, Ph.D.
Painting is a visual language that speaks with its own rhythm, organizational syntax, and lyrical cadence. To look at Michael Dwyer’s paintings is to give yourself over to looking at colors and shapes and textures that exist playfully on the surface of a plane, yet in a seriously complicated way.
At first, one’s eye wants to track the upper layer of painted structures that bend and jerk like a conga line of conjoined dancers, and then you see how many layers and purposefully altered decisions went into the build-up of his paint below. Dwyer thinks of these strata as akin to the layering of instruments and the interweaving medley of sounds that happens over time in a piece of music.
Also like jazz, there is a tension between the sense of control and improvisation in Dwyer’s paintings. One can follow the jig across the painted surface, where bars of color bend and intersect, approach the limits of the painting’s edge only to stop short, or carry on into imagined elsewheres. Each bar is a different color, and in that bar are layers of past color choices, sometimes fighting to rise to the surface like a ghost, and other times anonymously adding layers of thickness to the final opaque color choice. This density and subtle quality of relief give the paintings an objectness, and asks the viewer to walk back and forth to take in little shadows, amplifying the sense of rhythm and movement.
Dwyer uses a palette knife to scrape and smooth paint, but also whatever is at hand. While he used to paint in a more organic, rounded, and gestural way with a brush, now he is a happy workman, troweling his bricks of color into built worlds. The paint layers in the background offer up clouds of color on which the hard-edged bars float in a colorful ether. As with Kazimir Malevich’s or Ellsworth Kelly’s geometric forms that hover on the painted surface, seeming to take a living breath, there is a sense of “being in the world” in Dwyer’s forms in space. They, too, feel as if they are hovering and jostling, announcing their impossible sentience.
Dwyer and I have at various times marveled over painting and how so many seemingly disparate parts could come together in a composition that teeters on the edge of falling apart during the making, only to have the artist stop when it seems inexplicably “right.” There is a resolution that cannot always be explained, particularly when there is no figurative subject matter to gauge, but the result is astounding, and each time the conditions of a painting’s “rightness” are excitingly different.
But then, Dwyer has been trained from childhood to recognize the fitness of compositions. His parents, both painters, raised him in a home in which modernism was the thing, and took him to museums as a natural practice. His paintings speak directly to so many of the artists’ styles that he has absorbed by faithful looking— Paul Klee, Brice Marden, Piet Mondrian, Elizabeth Murray, and Frank Stella, to name a few. Stuart Davis is close to home at this stage in Dwyer’s career. Like Davis who pronounced his direct connection with jazz, Dwyer comes back again and again to his love of music when describing his process, as well as his evangelical adherence to abstraction. This exhibition’s title, “Swing Set,” is an homage to Davis, as well as a reference to music and play. Because above all, paintings should be thrilling to make and see.
Free Times – Arts Feature
Local Artist Michael Dwyer Revels in Playful Abstraction
“Michael Dwyer’s paintings aren’t really about anything. That’s the point.”
Burgundy