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PIERMARQ* presents Cannon Dill
Sydney Contemporary 2023, Booth H05
Carriageworks
7 to 11 September
“Through a feverish fog, ashes become stars and pigment bleeds into the foreground, compressing the space between imagination and reality.” – Cannon Dill.
The LA-based Cannon Dill’s artworks maintain simple storytelling and uniquely textured mark-making by combining colourful abstractions and playful figuration with sharp design elements – his textured paintings depict animals and everyday scenes in a faux-naïf style.
Cannon Dill, Sunflowers; Desert Lily/Spiral pot; Fire Flower; Summer Bull 2. Courtesy the artist and PIERMARQ*, Sydney
A blend of the familiar and bizarre, Dill invites viewers “to traverse the paintings as one would meander through the warm blue evening air.” Signature elements of his compositions, such as birds, bulls, horses, and fish, return the viewer’s gaze, refracting the direction of observation. Vases and perfume bottles refer to the process of distillation, echoing the artist’s style of extracting only the essential details of his subjects.
For his upcoming exhibition at PIERMARQ* in Sydney, Heat of the Valley, Dill evokes the haze of summer through thirteen works of ochre and orange acrylic on canvas, depicting landscapes with wild plants and animals, completed amid the heatwave of the Californian summer. In Fire Flower, vivid, stylised flames form the jagged leaves of the Joshua Tree, like firecrackers evoking a blazing hot desert evening under starry skies. Still lifes such as Sunflowers recall Matisse’s cutouts in their emphasis on colour and line, with Dill’s unique and playful textured marks made using a sliced jalapeno pepper as a stamp for applying acrylic paint in the flower’s centre.
Image courtesy PIERMARQ*, Sydney
Dill has exhibited in Los Angeles, Oakland, and New York and is included in public collections such as the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
