Damian Stamer: Ruminations
March 17, 2023 – October 15, 2023
Gallery 2 & 3
Damian Stamer: Ruminations showcases new work by North Carolina-based contemporary painter Damian Stamer. Stamer depicts barns, abandoned buildings, and other vernacular structures of the rural South, often in large scale. His heavily layered surfaces blur the line between abstraction and representation as they seek to express the solemn beauty of the old and overlooked. Stamer’s work considers the intersection of past and present, and how new technologies and modes of expression influence traditional approaches to painting. Ruminations includes a selection of paintings informed by the use of artificial intelligence. Rather than painting from photographs as source material, Stamer used an artificial intelligence text-to-image generator to create source imagery, resulting in innovative paintings titled the Collaboration series.
"I want people to see the beauty in the forgotten and the old and the tired… a classical beauty in the everyday."
– Damian Stamer, 2016 for My Home, NC