November 2021: Dennis Meiners

Dennis Meiners works in stoneware. His surface drawings are made with a technique called Mishima, which involves drawing into the still-wet surface, laying a dark slip into the lines, letting it dry, then scraping away the excess to reveal the lines. “My variation on classic Mishima is to paint in the grays with thin washes of the dark slip. I am making these forms to be vehicles for portraits of animals whose futures are in peril because of human activities. The creatures portrayed in this show stand for themselves, of course, and they are metaphors for the many thousands of others whose populations are in decline. As a human I share culpability for this extinction event, the first to be caused by one species, and as an artist I have a responsibility to describe my experience of this time and depict what I see.