OPENING RECEPTION @ 6 pm
MUSICAL PERFORMANCES @ 9 pm
WITH DEAN CERCONE (NYC)
And
UNDERWATER FATHERING (MIA)
(Miguel Morte Valentine and Nick Delucas’ side project)

Arrington de Dionyso is an artist and experimental musician (Old Time Religun, Malaikat dan Singa) living in Olympia, WA. His current project is This Saxophone Kills Fascists. For the past two decades, his artwork has been shown nationally and internationally. His designs were featured prominently on prints and embroideries in Saint Laurent’s Psych Rock Collection for Spring/Summer 2015.

ABOUT HIS ART
Arrington de Dionyso gives us so much in any single work that we often feel drunk while viewing them, which is entirely fitting because Dionysus is the god of wine and reverie. The thing that always gets me about Arrington de Dionyso’s paintings is their overabundance: their generosity, their imagination.

Beings gather in Dionyso’s world to celebrate and evoke other spirits, other feelings, cosmic feelings, but not to mock or disturb. Like Paul Klee’s toy world of puppets, occult gardens, and crepuscular fish tanks, Dionyso’s cosmos is free flowing and boundless. Anything and everything can happen, and anything usually does happen so long as it’s not too spooky or an affront to The Spirits.

What makes Dionyso’s work modern is his technique. Animal bodies, human forms, plants, antlers, wings, faces and space itself are reduced to their essentials. The beings are elaborately designed, but there’s no fussiness; the forms themselves and their invention are more important than minute details, like cave paintings, or the characters in a Minoan fresco. The space is limitless because it’s in our mind. There’s no need for atmospheric, illusory depth, or even perspective here because everything’s already right there. We fill in the blanks with our imagination, more evidence of Dionyso’s generosity.

But what makes Dionyso contemporary is a feeling of being lost and found, neither here nor there: things becoming other things either through biological morphosis, faerie magick, or by putting on a mask or another creature’s head. It looks like the distant past, yet it also could be from a post-technological future. Specific, yet nonspecific, it’s all totally “right here,” but it’s also sort of elusive, like chasing a mirage, The Spirits laughing at us, inviting us to play, yet always just out of reach, like a pagan sunset made of millions of spiderwebs.

Excerpt – Lawrence Pearce’s Introduction to Arrington de Dionyso’s book of concert poster work, Lost & Found.

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