Today’s Guest Blogger is Dan Deibler ’12 whose exhibition Deconstructing the Human Form is on exhibit in the Rothman Gallery Atrium in the Steinman Student Center (ground floor) through May 12, 2012.

Legs, 2012, Under Copyright, Used with the permission of Dan Deibler

“I believe the most important element of my study to discuss is how I made the leap from discovering the viewer’s identity to discovering my own. Since the beginning of my study, I had proposed that peeling away layers of people’s skin (theoretically speaking) could reveal something about their identity that they took for granted. During the course of the study, I could never really elaborate any more on how, an idea that haunted me for a long time. To ease this feeling, I would simply tell myself to just keep painting, and the answer would reveal itself to me.

It took me up until the past month to realize that trying to force the audience to draw conclusions about their identifies using my representations was foolish. Each painting was, and could not have been otherwise, an extension of myself. Even with access to “scientifically objective” medical imaging, everything I made was always at least one step removed from the original source. That step contained predispositions exclusive to me no matter how accurate I tried to capture the subject. My finger prints are all over the paintings, both literally and figuratively. My project in its current state is trying to bridge the gap between my internal physiological self and the objects and ideas that exist outside my body. While I certainly hope for my audience to draw the same conclusions that I do, I feel that it’s too big of a stretch to expect each viewer to achieve such a revelation about themselves.

My favorite painting at the present time is Legs. The painting is covered from top to bottom in heavy brush strokes, palette knife slashes, ridges, smudges, and drips, and still looks like a pair of legs. I tend to hold these landmarks and artifacts of the painting process in high regard.”