Diane Dwyer’s first solo show at the gallery featured he signature “dramatic oils of splay-winged birds sideswiped by tumultuous weather … a true delight.” (Village Voice Best of 2006), as well as lovely skewed perspectives of skies with wires, cornices and other seemingly banal objects teasing us from outside the center of the picture, leaving space and time for contemplation of their meeting with the “divine” and timeless sky-scapes with which they were paired. The new work is looser, and we think “deeper” both literally and otherwise. With her incorporation of images from the sunken USS Saratoga WW2 Warship, Dwyer appears to be coming up to the surface as a painter, fast and furiously, during an intensive time of work at the UCROSS residency in Wyoming just before this show. She has written such a wonderful, open statement that we prefer to let it speak for itself:

i always work from either my own photos or ones taken from amateur websites, and one day as i was looking for storm references on the web, i stumbled upon another sort of cloud…. atomic, to be exact. remembering the old duck-and-cover routine from my ohio grade school, i followed that trail and i tried working with a few of those images- they’re clouds too, after all. they didn’t work for me, though- too wrought with volatile content- too easily made trite, overdone, overseen. but, alas, in my travels i found another atomic story…one i’d neverheard before…another set of images that stopped me in my tracks. i found pictures that were even more luminous and eerie than the greenest midwestern tornado funnel…photos of a battleship purposely sunk in the Pacific as a result of atomic testing in the 40’s. this ship, the uss saratoga, has been lying on the ocean floor for 60 years. in the pictures either the divers flashlight or the weird glow from the bottom of the sea itself is illuminating the boat. the light is so beautiful, and unpredictable, soft & sensous i fell head over heels in love. at the same time i found these images, my painting style- normally quite formal and exacting with many glazed layers, started to loosen up and leave things a little less defined. i began to use more paint in my brush and fidget more directly on the panel. funny, this seems to have gone hand-in-hand with the the fact that now i was painting l’iquid’ instead of `vapor’. of course, water is the obvious connection between the clouds and a shipwreck, but i wasn’t thinking about that. my nose led me first to the sky and then the ocean because in both places the light is confusing…. and surprising…and even wrong sometimes. i guess i have looked at light a lot over the years and i want to be entertained… to find something new. this is why i don’t work from my head and prefer to consult photographs. whenever i create from memory i get bored. i already know the information i have stored in my head. while i’m working i want to discover something—something not me, not mine.

of course, the metaphoric content in this group of paintings of a warship is not lost on me and i suppose had something to do with my selection of it as a subject. my instinct-elbow jabbed me in the ribs initially because of the light (for me, the story always comes second), but i can say it only adds to my pleasure that the imagery asks a question about us humans…. the idea of our government blowing up its own war toy, created exclusively to destroy, sending it to the bottom of the ocean where it lies silent all these years, while nature climbs right on board, converting it into something useful for her purposes. the ship is now a reef—teeming with life.” For some obscure reason, when unpacking this new work, I was reminded instantaneously of Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which begins with an anecdote about an encounter between a scientist and an old lady:

A well-known scientist (some say it was the philosopher Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?”

“You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”