Mitch Messina and Lynn Dugan
Coalesce is the shared layering of similar narrative content, personal aesthetic, and visual complexity, between two artists working with the figure. After exchanging rudimentary sketches, each artist developed individual interpretations of the other’s drawings, letting the work coalesce and evolve from the combination of distinct elements.
Artist Statement: Lynn Duggan
Referring directly to contemporary issues such as immigration policy, neo-fascism, and the #MeToo movement, my work comments on the “collateral damage” of oppressive ideologies and the rhetoric of hate.
At its core, my work deals with the politics of power. Using a feminist lens, I focus on the experiences of women and other marginalized people. Figurative imagery is prevalent, the body being a site of social and political conflict, and space from which we understand our world and ourselves.
Artist Statement: Messina
My work explores how advancements in tools and technology have transformed the nature of human interaction. From primitive existence to today’s digital age, tools have marked stages in the development of civilization and provide evidence that human beings continue to advance along an evolutionary continuum. Early tools were not only the extension of the human body but also of the mind, serving as a way of existing in and making sense of the physical world. The catalyst behind my sculpture is the belief that the relationship between man and object no longer extends our capabilities, but instead has begun to limit society. Tools born from advanced technology are creating an emotionally alienated society, devoid of direct human contact. Using anonymous male figures, gestures, and tension, my sculpture expresses narratives of the weakening of genuine human interaction. Chosen as the central material for my work, clay represents a raw material connection to the earth; however, when cast into molds and used in repetition, it simultaneously references the flashpoint of dehumanization through mass production. I, therefore, merge the feeling of alienation that modern tools have created with nostalgia for a once-empathetic society fueled by human exchange.