Dylan Everett | Artist Talk – online in the Griffin Zoom Room

We are excited to host artist Dylan Everett to the Griffin Zoom Room to talk about his exhibition on the walls of the Founders Gallery

Join us online in the Griffin Zoom Room on Wednesday October 13th at 7pm.

This event is FREE to Griffin Museum members. $10 for Non Members. Interested in Membership and its benefits? See more about what the Griffin offers on our Griffin Members Community.

About his work – 

The preface to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is a series of aphorisms about art and beauty, including the declaration that “all art is at once surface and symbol.” If all art is at once surface and symbol, I create symbolic surfaces. Through the use of photo-collage, still life, and re-photography, my pictures collapse figure and ground into surface. Drawing from a range of references – my personal life, literature, art, pop culture – and cultural signifiers, these surfaces are loaded with symbols. The viewer is invited to decode these symbols, or at least to try. The symbols in my images often function as homages to the people and things that I love or admire: LGBTQ-identified creative figures, gay icons, and personal relationships. In one instance, this manifests as a room constructed of cyanotypes inspired by John Dugdale; in another, a grisaille room winks to George Platt Lynes’ black-and-white male nudes that remained hidden until after his death; rose wallpaper hints at the titular setting of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. This series of homages is held together by an aesthetic that strips away any sense of hierarchy among cultural signifiers. In my fabricated spaces, there is no distinction between highbrow and lowbrow, personal or famous, historical or contemporary. The resulting photographs are layered, symbolic works that simultaneously speak to contemporary art and culture, while questioning classic ideas of taste, sensuality, and beauty.

About Dylan Everett

Dylan Everett (b. 1994 in New Jersey) is an artist/photographer working with still life and photo collage. He received an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019, and a BA in Visual Art from Brown University in 2016. In 2020 he was a recipient of the West Collection LIFTS Grant and Acquisition Award; he was previously awarded the Digital Silver Imaging Portfolio Prize in 2018, and was named second place for the 2019 Lenscratch Student Prize.