Feral Fables: O Pioneer & Family Fremds

Drift Opens October 6th At Rosalux Gallery

Drift, featuring new work from artists John Diebel and Terrence Payne, presents allegories based on the demagoguery and angst resulting from the woes of an uncertain future. Diebel’s abstracted cut paper collages take the temperature of our current political and social climate while Payne’s drawings examine the fears and anxieties which lay quietly beneath the surface. While not directly confronting the actors at the center of the melodramatic struggles that will determine our national fate, Drift pursues the underlying motivations and fears that have made this uncomfortably familiar drama repeat itself once again.

John Diebel creates abstract geometric metaphors through his use of cut paper collage and relief techniques . Using a stark graphic style evocative of Brutalist architecture intermingled with vaguely identifiable logotypes, Diebel proposes that the building blocks of Fascism have been deployed throughout our global society, and that they are now becoming synergistic through the dark alchemy of political demagoguery and corporate control. His compositions create allegories of the illusions we may hold about the substance and stability of our world in an age of mass surveillance, militarized police, a vast prison-industrial complex, reactionary nationalism, and the persistence of institutionalized racism.

Terrence Payne taps into the unsettling paranoia wafting about the zeitgeist resulting in the feeling that life is a rigged game. He lunges straight at the source of this anxiety identified simply with the question of, “Why?” Terrence uses the aggravated playfulness of his large-scale oil pastel drawings to document the eternal struggle of determinism vs. fate in humankind’s never ending pursuit of the answer to this nagging question. He creates archetypical portraits using pattern, narrative, animals, and costumed figures to tackle the illusions of chance while rendering suspect the arrogance of determinism. The humorous and empathetic allegories resulting from Payne’s creations may leave more questions than answers to his initial query, but will surely offer entertaining comforts for his audience nonetheless.

Drift will be on display at Rosalux Gallery October 6th through October 30th with an artist reception Saturday, October 15th from 7 - 11 PM. Rosalux Gallery is located at 1400 Van Buren Street NE, Ste 195 in Minneapolis, Minnesota 55413.