November 4 - December 31, 2021
From Brick Gallery at Blue Star Arts Complex:
“Join Brick in a solo exhibition of artist Billy Dietz. Dietz is a wannabe psychoanalyst who turned to art instead. By painting and drawing he depicts the unconscious mind of a fictional priest named Father Mark. In this body of work we see images of a dream of Father Mark’s in which he manifests as a phallic creature consisting of an arm, head, and hand, which is intimate with a bird and woman. This bird references the Catholic myth of the Pelican that pecked its own breast in order to feed its starving babies its blood. We see Father embrace, receive maternal comfort from, and feed the bird blood from his breast. We also see signs of Father at times longing for some woman and at other times kissing her. These images emerge from the aesthetics of the Catholic imagination such as stained glass windows, Boschian characters, an incarnational worldview, and biblical references. Similar to third-person omniscient fiction, through these paintings and drawings we can analyze the unconscious sparks of another individual. The images depict the poetic space between the lines that ignores what Father might preach about or how he might fail to articulate these private struggles.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
In 2016 Deitz received his BFA in visual arts from the University of North Dakota, and in 2020 he earned his MFA in studio arts at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He has been included in publications such as Young Space Artists, Top Painters Top Paintings, La Tranchée Racine, and BlueBee Magazine. He was an alternate for a Fulbright research grant in Bulgaria. Dietz has been part of various exhibitions including the North Dakota Museum of Art, The Ewing Gallery at the University of Tennessee, Sugar Gallery in Arkansas, Bascom Center for the Arts in North Carolina, Foley Gallery in New York, ZG gallery in Chicago, Shockboxx in California, Studio Montclair in New Jersey, Bemis Center for Contemporary art in Nebraska, and Collar Works in New York. Billy Dietz lives and works in San Antonio TX.
ABOUT BRICK
Brick at Blue Star Arts Complex has about 4,800 square feet of indoor gallery space in the urban core of San Antonio, Texas. Brick is an arts venue designed to nurture visual, music, literary, theatre, dance, film, fashion, performance, culinary, markets, and experimental art projects.”
Reception: November 4, 2021 | 6–10 pm
Reception: November 5, 2021 | 6–10 pm
Brick at Blue Star Arts Complex
108 Blue Star
San Antonio, 78204 Texas
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