Installation image by Tom DuBrock
“With Garage Days, Houston-based Kent Dorn (b. 1977, South Carolina) unveils a trove of drawings from 2014. The exhibition shares its title with a Metallica EP released in 1987 that features covers of B-sides; its use here acknowledges the formative impact of metal music, counterculture, and its imagery on Dorn’s work. Growing up in a deindustrialized South Carolina, the show’s tone relates to a period of the artist’s youth characterized by impermanence. Employing cardboard for these drawings conjures numerous associations, ranging from commonplace, rough, and trashy to ephemeral, punk rock, and high-low culture. Dorn also nods to the use of cardboard by Munch, van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec, and questions the value of left behind or overlooked objects.”
