Dustin London’s work stems from a fascination with the flexibility and instability of pictorial space. Through an improvised choreography of paper, mark, form, and void, he looks for compositions to achieve a state of suspension where form and emptiness readily exchange roles, and spatial positions are slippery, dependent upon the way one chooses to see.
London’s drawings on handmade washi (和紙, Japanese paper) are a response to time spent with the stone gardens of Buddhist temples in Kyoto, which offer ideas about arrangement and balance, compression and expansion of layered space, and interactions between organic and geometric elements. A garden is a collaboration with nature in which humans must understand the essential characteristics of stones, trees, and plants, in order to create a highly refined space that invites aesthetic and spiritual contemplation. Just as a garden designer listens to the “request of the stone” when composing a garden, each sheet of washi offers its own suggestions for how and where a mark might be made, and can act as a guide when searching out the cartography of a shape, be it drawn or ‘empty.’
A method of garden design known as miegakure (見え隠れ), translated as ‘hide and reveal,’ has been particularly influential in the development of London’s stacked and layered compositions. It uses overlapping elements to obstruct one’s view, such that objects or spaces are only partially visible from any given point. The result is an atmosphere of suggestion and implication that prompts a viewer to imagine what is unseen and charges the space with mystery and potentiality.
Dustin London’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as NURTUREart, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and Heskin Contemporary in New York City, Zen House Gallery and ANEWAL Gallery in Kyoto, Warbling Collective in London, Untitled Art Fair in Miami, Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, and Holding House in Detroit. He has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, Millay Colony, ANEWAL Gallery KKARC in Kyoto, AiR Fukujusou in Kyoto, Willapa Bay AiR, Jentel, Vermont Studio Center, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. London is a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and his work has been featured in New American Paintings, Two Coats of Paint, Art Maze Magazine, Friend of the Artist, and The New York Times. He holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and a BFA from Michigan State University. He currently lives and works in Ann Arbor, MI and is a Professor in the School of Art & Design at Eastern Michigan University.
