Steve Turner Contemporary will present its first exhibition of painting and sculpture by Southern California artist Mark Dutcher. Dutcher's work is engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the tenets of abstract painting and allegories of the contemporary world.
Havilah, the title of this exhibition, is taken from the mountain community in Northern Kern County that has a rich mining history. Once a city of abundance and big dreams, Halivah is now a sleepy ghost town off the beaten path. A native Californian, Dutcher sees the changes in his environment that have occurred over time as a metaphor for personal feelings of impermanence and loss. He creates paintings and sculptures that are monuments to a time, place or individual he does not want forgotten. His unrestrained use of paint (often blurring the lines between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional), the insistence on the presence of the hand and an embrace of the urgency of life-lived, is a celebration of the "Mighty Real" (one of the works is a homage to Sylvester, the "Queen of Disco" who died of AIDS).
Born in 1963 in Newport Beach, California, Mark Dutcher has been exhibiting his work in Southern California since the early 1990s. He has had solo exhibitions at the Huntington Beach Art Center (2007), Santa Monica Museum of Art (2006), and has been in numerous group shows, including the 2004 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art; 2007 LA Weekly Annual organized by Doug Harvey at Track 16 Gallery; Life Lifelike: Painting in the Third Dimension, Sweeney Art Gallery, UC Riverside (2008) and "Fox Building 103," an installation organized by the Hammer Museum at Fox Studios, Summer 2008.