“Cross-Cut: Damian Stamer Paintings and Photographs
from the collection of Jim and Jane Finch,”
Craven Allen Gallery, 1106 Broad St., Durham, through July 12.
“Rummage: Damian Stamer, large-scale paintings,”
Flanders Gallery, 302 S. West St., Raleigh, through May 31.
Damian Stamer (b. 1982) is into nostalgia, not just with his images, but the way he paints those images. His canvases are filled with dilapidated barns and sheds buckling under debris. The surfaces are blurry, hazy and sometimes spotted with what seem to be droplets of rainwater. He insists we see things he remembers from his childhood or things that are slowly deteriorating in front of his eyes. And we must see them as he does, in the fog of memory. In the gallery handout, he writes about returning over and over to his past, that there is comfort in familiarity. “Time passes slowly as things fall apart,” he writes, and painting is the only way to describe these places, which he confesses exist more in his mind than on earth.
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