Duston Spear – Works on Paper & Paper Boats
On view in the Conference Room in September and October

The works in this exhibition were made alongside my novel, Bird Girl. This is how I think: in the visual. While I was writing about Rebekah Hunnicutt – an artist who cuts apart, covers, saves, reworks, and returns to things – I was doing much the same thing in my studio. The novel and the artwork grew beside each other, each finding its way through fragments, association, memory, and material.

Hair is a running theme in Bird Girl. Known for her long red hair, Rebekah sacrifices her signature braid when her boyfriend wants to make it the center of his next art exhibition. In these works, I used artificial hair – impossibly red – letting it tangle with, obscure, and escape the images beneath it.

The two paper boats began with the idea of a single-occupancy boat, like the one Rebekah’s grandmother describes to her in Bird Girl. I made them from letters my own grandmother had written to me. As I constructed these little crafts using Elmer’s glue, something unexpected happened: the old ink bloomed turquoise again, her words suddenly fresh, reaching out to advise me again.

Writing Bird Girl and making these works came from the same impulse: to take what has been saved, overlooked, or nearly lost and look at it again.