Thursday, April 11, 2024, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Heather Gaudio Fine Art
382 Greenwich Avenue
Greenwich, CT 06830
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The award-winning filmmaker also known for his photography will debut his first series of paintings on aluminum race car parts.
The gallery will present Blunderbust, Dweck’s first paintings from the multi-media corpus that includes photography, sculpture, installations, and a feature documentary. Dweck is a multi-disciplinary artist known primarily for working in photography, most notably for his series documenting niche socio-cultural identities such as Mermaids, Habana Libre, and The End: Montauk. Over the years his artistic practice expanded to sculpture and filmmaking, and more recently he has delved into painting.
For over 70 years, the Long Island car raceways were a vital part of its small-town, blue-collar culture. Dweck grew up minutes from Freeport Stadium known for a survival-of-the-fittest type of racing rallies, “somewhere between NASCAR and Mad Max, whose wild theater – jostling colors and stench of gas and burnt rubber, the cacophony of screeching tires and crashing metal” made for some of the artist’s early memories.
As is the fate of many such enclaves, Freeport was replaced by a strip mall in 1983, and in 2007 Dweck began to document the last surviving rally called “Blunderbust” at Riverhead Raceway in Long Island. What began as an intent to document a dying tradition soon translated into other formalist concerns. For Dweck, the aesthetic aspect of the cars became works of art in their own right, with streaked, scored, and marked car bodies becoming painted surfaces evocative of folk art painting. The salvaged chassis also took on the properties of sculptural forms for the artist.
“In a broader social context, Riverhead became for me a paradigm of a fading Americana, one not of lament, however, but defiant celebration.” The artist returned to Riverhead over 10 years, developing the multi-media work of art that was to become Blunderbust.
“Inspired by the painted surfaces of the vehicles, the photographer became a painter himself, creating large paintings on aluminum.” explained gallery Director, Rachael Palacios. The imagery is sourced from collages archival photography and extreme close-ups of the lacerated painted metal. She continued, “The visual vernacular loses all sense of perspective as the artist seeks to amplify the multiple layers of paint, dings, dents, and scratches, highlighting various vestiges of the car’s history”.
Instead of being copies of car parts, these paintings are evocative of the track’s unbridled speed and raw intensity. Expressed with car paint applied with a paintbrush and aerosols, Dweck maintains a visual authenticity further enhanced by the physicality of creating these works using power tools, metal detritus, and rubber filling.
For more information and/or high-res images, please contact Rachael Palacios (rachael@heathergaudiofineart.com).