Andrew Reed Gallery is excited to announce Before I go, moving on, the gallery's first solo exhibition of new work by Colorado-based artist Devin Düster. This is Düster's debut solo exhibition in New York.

There are painters such as Edward Hopper who depict a window as if there were nothing there at all: its presence only inferred by a familiar hole in the wall with an otherwise perfectly visible background. Then there are painters such as Katherine Teale who make the glass the subject: carefully depicting the confusion of a partially visible background obscured by images projected from behind the viewer. Here there is no differentiation between background, foreground, and middle-ground; there is simply the glass painted as is. It is transparent and opaque; physically a separator of space and yet its point of convergence.

The window paradoxically allows one to see both more and less. Its reflections cover some portions, thereby bringing focus to other elements. In turn, information given from one perspective may differ from that of another. These complexities are explored in works like Parallax (a Conversation) and Mirage (a Memory), where the setting of the viewer is given further context by images in the windows. In Parallax, the same object – another window not pictured anywhere but in the glass of two different windows – is depicted in one case with light and detail alluding to a curtain, and in the other the window is darkened and its interior unclear. The two sides converse on the same topic yet are divided on its content. However, if one steps out of the painting, moving instead into their literal surroundings, to look at the side of the frame, they will find a small, embedded painting of that same window in the daytime. Although we still cannot see inside, we are reminded it possesses an actuality beyond the discourse. Mirage, meanwhile, taps into a more intimate reflection. The windows seem to reflect a more emotional rather than physical space, illustrating gridded cabinets atop a distant home starting to be consumed by darkness, or nothing at all. In combination with an empty seat holding impressions of the past and an unlatched door chain, the viewer seems to wait for someone missing: no one is pictured, and much like the cabinet disappears, the viewer is consumed by this lonely waiting.

The inside of the home becomes a place of internal reflection, of darkness, confusion and intimacy, while the outside one of objectivity and clarity, day and night. Together, they confront us with time: with change, life, and death. In works like The last time I’ll open to close that door and Fable (built to be torn down), where layered paints of different colors chip while wood appears to rot, passing time can be directly seen.

“My wife’s and my last apartment in New York had been painted over many times. The layers peeled and cracked, some were semi-transparent showing the yellowed paint beneath, and the top had a bluer tint. These layers were so thick that there were no longer any straight edges or flat surfaces. The hardware of one door in particular had been painted over so many times, reflecting many years of occupants. These were some of the first paintings I completed in Colorado. It was from the nights of looking at all the caked-up paint layers and the worn-down lockset, I had the realization that with moving I would never step through that door again.
The house we moved into in Colorado, I’ve been told, was originally a one room mining house, if that is true that’s where my studio is. The rest of the house was an extension built later. The exterior is cracking, the foundation is rotting, but despite everything in the interior being slightly lopsided and tilting one way or another, it is covered in cedar, pine, cherry veneer, and even oak. After a month of cleaning and fixing up, it isn’t perfect, but it is gorgeous. Everything is warm, with all the variations in wood contributing a unique glow. Some of the wood had been stripped of finishing when we arrived, so I spent some time refinishing a few of the surfaces and staining the porch. The wood nearly reflects as much as the windows at times. I was told, before the last couple who owned it passed away, the gardens used to bloom and the grass was green. The yard is now dirt and yellow plants, scattered with some bushes and a couple trees that have withstood the years, but the garden is gone. The new owner bought the house for the land and plans to plow it to build something entirely new. There is something special about being one of the last people to probably ever live in this house, but there is also a melancholy in realizing the history the house holds will be lost, and to see it be neglected by the current owners. It’s different to lose something unexpectedly and to know something will to be lost and be helpless to it. We are stuck in limbo. Leaving here feels like more of a loss than past places I’ve lived before. It’s made worse since it’s the first house my wife and I chose to live in together.”
— Devin Düster

The house becomes a microcosm of the world and its temporality, not only in the way it will one day be gone, but in the way it is a place where one lives and leaves, only for another to repeat the cycle in the same place. For the time one lives there, they will return to this home daily and live within, and it will become a large part of who they are. Each house remains in memory as a time infused with emotion.

In Before I go, moving on reflections of scenes projected from behind, like memories, are superimposed on the same plane as what is seen through glass, like the future. Walls, doors, locks, glass, and buildings can be malleable and impenetrable boundaries, depending on how it is experienced. Trees and wood showcase the stark difference of seeing a living thing in its intended habitat versus being objectified, harmed, or used (symbolically in the paintings, as well as materially in the frames). Thus, the fable of the home becomes a larger narrative of ambivalent relationships to self, family, country, and time. In reading the home as something ambivalent, inherently to be loved, lost, missed, lived within, separated, experienced by multiple individuals spanning over generations, each with their own story, one gains the ability necessary to make sense and learn from its complicated reality.

— Text by Patricia Geyerhahn, based on excerpts from Devin Düster