In a project conceived specifically for Allston Skirt Gallery's Project Room, Daniel Dueck looks at the natural world, both straight on, and as it is idealized in memory and in the media. Starry skies, trees at night, and many-masted schooners are some of the intriguing imagery represented in the newest body of paintings and works on paper by Dueck, a native of Winnipeg, Canada, who received his MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts/Tufts University, Boston in 2002. He is currently teaching at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.

Dueck works in unexpected media, incorporating glitter and construction paper collage into his paintings, and material from the craft store and the drugstore into his works on paper. The evocative textures he achieves create deep space in his work, which Dueck then combines with hard edged silhouette cut-outs and alternating flat and glossy black forms and raised shapes to create a dynamic interaction between depth and surface. His exploration of contrast is multi-faceted; black on black and white on white are recurring aspects of his vocabulary, as is an intriguing shift in emotional tone from light to dark between works.

This particular group of work originated in Dueck's thinking about idealized environments or places that exist both in the past or in the future, idiosyncratically cropped and placed to add to the personal nature of Dueck's vision as he references the skyline seen off the coast, or a tree seen from below. The work also evokes places he (and we) may only know through mass media -- a tropical island in a rum ad, or outer space as Hollywood sees it. And the past plays a role here, too, as nostalgia colors images of rabbits and ships, referencing a child's idealization of place and identity in the form of Captain Hook's vessel or a mischievous bunny.

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