WASTEMAN

The work of Brian Michael Dunn sits somewhere between pattern and decoration, pop-art, and anthropology: Dunn starts by collecting patterns, textures, and motifs from such disparate sources as advertising, comics, packaging, early modernist textiles and quilts, and weaves them together to create spectacular, dazzling compositions that overwhelm the senses with their masterful complexity. Layer after layer, each affecting the one before it: a layer of waves, followed by a net texture, sprinkled with flower and quilting motifs, the eyes become trapped within all the moire patterns and interference that result from such a process. Interested in our collective daily visual experience, the elements Dunn plays with are all too familiar: ben day dots that reproduce images in comics and newspapers; flat graphics favored in advertisements and shipping decals; intricate patterns in fabrics, wallpaper, and botanical illustrations. Dunn is curating his palette from our peripheral experiences, borrowing from things that we see but do not necessarily look at with intention: the visual background noise of our day to day lives, giving us a chance to recognize our own patterns of behavior when it comes to our most favored sense—sight.