Second Spring: Brian Michael Dunn and E.E. Ikeler

Washington, D.C

Pazo Fine Art is pleased to announce Second Spring, an exhibition featuring the works of Brian Michael Dunn and E.E. Ikeler. The exhibition will be on view in Washington D.C., at 1932 9th Street NW (enter from 9 ½ Street) from April 11th, 2025, through June 7th, 2025. An opening reception will take place on Friday, April 11th, from 5 to 7 PM.

Dunn and Ikeler both thematize the process of visual signification, their works focalizing a navigation of intricate, overlapping interfaces renderable only through the universal language of abstraction: data is embedded within each layer of their paintings, simultaneously obscured and assigned with meaning at the moment in which they are enveloped. Despite referencing objects present within the three-dimensional world, any sense of their internal natures are tainted once fixed in the syntactical structure of painting; meaning hence erupts through slippages of pattern, an excavatory proclamation of what is to be unearthed in the core of each work.

E.E. Ikeler’s featured paintings—spanning across a variety of their series—are unified through their conceptual reimaginings of a contemporary Romanticism, pertaining to conspiracy theories, astrological readings, and other forms of occult thinking. These transcendent, sublime ideals are materialized through the kitschy imagery that Ikeler adopts, serving as a framing device for the world building models they attempt to replicate. Dunn, in a similar vein, frames his work through the imposition of visual screens, adopted from the physical and digital borders that dictate and modulate the surrounding world. His paintings embody the affective potential of digital mediation, orienting the attention of spectators towards what underlies the hypermediated surface of the canvas. Dunn’s forms are drawn from the symbolic languages of construction, mechanical production, and graphic notation, and are subsequently redeployed in response to the natural world. In producing their works, Ikeler employs a symmetrical, additive process in coating a collage with a layer of resin, 3D printer filament, paint, and miscellaneous materials that is then constellated with pendants imprinted with pressed flowers. The two-dimensional space that Ikeler’s work occupies, distinguished through the systematic boundaries of a grid, parallels Dunn’s construction of a digital interface; the artists trace the potential for semantic convolution and reinscription within the boundaries of the art object.

The title Second Spring references the famous line constructed by poet Thomas Gray, calling on his readers “to breathe a second spring.” As both artists reappropriate a variety of natural symbols into largely unnatural visual spaces, a distinct sense of beauty emerges; the exhibition embraces the aesthetic appeal of the reinvocation of meaning under the structures of digitized culture.

An essay by Baltimore-based writer and educator Laurence Ross will accompany this exhibition.