Endlessly intrigued by the crumbling tobacco barns and abandoned houses near his hometown, Interiors narrows the scope of Damian Stamer’s ongoing visual investigation of North Carolina’s rural landscape, rendered through the lens of his childhood memories. Stamer’s visual and emotional return to these places evokes a tension between his own modes of seeing and remembering, resulting in distinct depictions that mark the past’s contradictory dissolution and persistence.
Interiors—as internal spaces of buildings, or in reference to the architecture of our minds—are configurations of perception, personal histories, and time. Stamer’s work expresses the ironic beauty in the changing of both everything and nothing—the way the past engenders an awareness of the present, and vice versa.
Colorful, gestural energies vibrantly dart across Stamer’s landscapes, representing the life still existing in these seemingly desolate spaces. Stamer’s practice confronts the problem of integrating realism with abstraction, for which he cites Robert Rauschenberg’s work as a point of departure. By using two opposing formal methods to compose space, Stamer proposes that these forces encourage each other stand out more than they would if they were to each appear on their own. This being true, these works constitute the reconciliation of multiple formal, spiritual, and temporal oppositions, ultimately inspiring a dialogue between our oscillating states of awareness across a lifetime.
Damian Stamer (American, b. 1982) has exhibited his works nationally and internationally, including venues such as Koki Arts, Tokyo, Japan; Budapest Art Factory, Budapest, Hungary; and The School, Jack Shainman Gallery, Kinderhook, NY. His work has been collected by The Toyota Collection, Houston, Texas and the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina, among others. Stamer received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Jacob K. Javits fellow in 2013. He also studied at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts as a Fulbright grantee, and the State Academy of Art and Design in Stuttgart, Germany as a Rotary Ambassadorial scholar. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and Durham, North Carolina.