October 3, 2015 — January 3, 2016 | Art League Gallery
Reception: November 6, 2015 | 5:00 – 9:00 p.m.
Dempsey will provide a gallery talk about his work beginning at 6:30 p.m.
These paintings bring together a variety of spaces, environments and perspectives in order to confront and examine our sense of place. They include scenes from factories, churches, government facilities, public & private spaces and landscapes for the purpose of an immediate experience and comparison. Just as the WPA and the American Scene painters from the early twentieth century drew from an immediate experience of their environment to create a sense of time and place, so must we. We move through a collage of industrial, post-industrial, modern and postmodern environments and work to resolve how to understand landscape and nature within this sequential and temporal experience of place. These compositions are offered in order to visually explore and chronicle this complex process.
—John Dempsey, 2015
Dempsey is an Associate Professor of Art at Mott Community College in Flint, MI. He earned his MFA at Central Washington University and has work in the collections of the Flint Institute of Arts, the Scottsdale Center for the Arts the Yuma Art Museum and Detroit Metropolitan Airport as well as commissioned work for Bishop International Airport, Flint, MI; the Pfizer Research Center, Groton, CT; and General Motors SPO Headquarters, Grand Blanc, MI. He is also a participant in the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies Program. Recent solo exhibitions include the Semans Gallery, Durham Center for the Arts, Durham, NC; ARC Gallery, Chicago, IL; and the Northville Art House, Northville, MI.
