Dike Blair

exerpt from this interview: http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/dike-blair-with-steel-stillman/

SS Did the materials you began to use in the mid-’90s for the carpet and light sculptures also come from those kinds of places and experiences?




DB There is a paradoxical overlap between the paintings and the sculptures: they get at the same information in different ways. I might have a painting of a casino interior and a light sculpture that includes casino carpet. The painting uses deadpan illusionistic rendering, whereas the sculpture is an abstraction, conceived in a constructivist form. One is a near-photorealist representation of a subject that may contain a certain ambience; the other is a concrete manifestation that, among other things, tries to get at a similar ambience.



I tend to work in binaries, and they show up not just between one practice and another, but within each of my practices. It always seems to me that if you make a decision to do one thing that the opposite decision makes just as much sense. There’s always a flip side. I often work on sculptures in tandem—a tendency that the installation at the Weatherspoon will highlight. As I’m developing a piece, I’ll make a decision to go one way, fully aware that I could have gone the other; the second sculpture is about what happens on that other road.