Deborah Dancy: Pernicious Beauty - June 22 - August 27, 2016

K. Imperial Fine Art is pleased to present Pernicious Beauty, its first solo exhibition of the work of Deborah Dancy.

Deborah’s work examines the intersection between abstraction and representation. That grey area just before an image defines itself. “The poetic region of the incomplete, the fragment, the ruin and residue of ‘almost was’ and ‘might become.’ I construct imagined forms from my curiosity and examination of the disjointed properties that exist between natural and architectural structures. I build on these oddly similar properties by merging disconcerting color, abutments and abrupt juxtapositions to fabricate work where reason is suspended and beauty is suspect; paint is both hard and lush and line defines and deflates. In the end, I want to create an ambiguous yet real space where these elements collide, mutate and coexist.” — Deborah Dancy

In addition to her paintings, Deborah will present selections of photographs from the series “Leaning Tower of Painting Mishaps and Slumps”. Depicting clay sculptures reminiscent of the paint scrapings and residue from her painting process, she considers these works extensions of her paintings.

Deborah Dancy is currently a professor of art at the University of Connecticut and has been on the faculty in the Department of Art and Art History since 1981. She has received numerous significant honors and awards, including: a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, New England Foundation for the Arts/NEA Individual Artist Grant, Nexus Press Artist Book Project Award, Visual Studies Artist Book Project Residency Grant, The American Antiquarian Society’s William Randolph Hearst Fellowship, a YADDO Fellow, Women’s Studio Workshop Residency Grant, Connecticut Commission of the Arts Artist Grant, as well as a Connecticut Book Award Illustration Nominee.

She has exhibited nationally and internationally at museums and institutions such as The Fuller Museum, The Housatonic Museum, The Mattatuck Museum, The College of Saint Rose, The University of Rhode Island, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, The Spencer Museum, The Mead Art Museum, SACI Gallery, Florence, Italy, The US Embassy in Paris, and The DeCordova Museum. Her work is included in the collections of The Boston Museum of Fine, The Birmingham Museum of Art, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Montgomery Museum of Art, The Spencer Museum of Art, The Hunter Museum of Art, Vanderbilt University, Grinnell College, Oberlin College Museum of Art, Davidson Art Center, The Detroit Museum of Art, Wesleyan, Davidson Art Center, SACI Gallery, Florence, Italy, The Detroit Museum of Art, Wesleyan University, The Bellagio Hotel, and The United States Embassy in Cameroon.

Pernicious Beauty will be on view June 22 – August 27, 2016 with a reception for the artist Thursday, July 7^th 5:30 – 7:30pm.