Dillon DeWaters

Dillon DeWaters is an artist working in traditional and experimental photography and video. He received his MFA in Advanced Photographic Studies from the International Center of Photography/Bard College in 2010, where he was awarded the ICP Director’s Fellowship in 2009, and his BFA in Photography from Arizona State University in 2002. He has participated in many group exhibitions, including, “Brand Innovations for Ubiquitous Authorship,” at Higher Pictures gallery in summer 2012, “Useful Pictures” at Michael Matthews Gallery and “Beyond the Barrier” at the Camera Club of New York, both in spring 2013, and “Lightplay” at Moscow’s Gallery 21 in winter 2013. In 2012, he was awarded a Tierney Fellowship by the Tierney Family Foundation. He has been Director of Photography and Imaging at Vik Muniz Studio since 2011. His work was published in Conveyor 5: Spectre // Spectrum, and he was commissioned by Conveyor to create the Indigo artist’s book for their “Visible Spectrum” book series. His work is in the exhibition The Future is Forever exhibition at International Center of Photography at Mana Contemporary and he has a forthcoming book with S_U_N_.

All of Dillon’s photographs are made in camera, on film, using a variety of color gels, filters, handmade masking devices and multiple exposures. Utilizing both photographic strobes and natural light, he constructs compositions of simple objects and shoots them using techniques he finds in the technical manuals of early photography. The resultant images could be mistaken for film stills from B-horror or science fiction films. This is a search for an iconography, a set of symbols that suspends, or tries to defeat – if momentarily – the fixed laws of nature. In doing so, the work cultivates the strangely beautiful, and develops an atmosphere of otherness, of groundless dread, of breathless wonder, as well as an unsettling reverie for both the mundane and the fantastic. These are photographic transgressions, striving to break the rules of photography, subverting ideas of representation, truth, potent surfaces, stillness; through these transgressions, the work seeks to make visible the uncanny, the weird, the unfamiliar, the aura, and to overturn, to upset, to undermine rules and conventions.

Website: www.dillondewaters.com
Email: dillon@dillondewaters.com