I have a deal with the artist Brady Dollyhigh. I don’t ask where he gets the battered, sheet metal traffic signs he uses as canvases for his paintings. And he does not volunteer the information. I don’t need to know.
Because all of those official “no parking here” and “construction ahead” types of warnings that he recycles somehow, somewhere from the street and covers with oil paint speak volumes on their own about Dollyhigh’s work. There is a reckless daring to his process, a youthful disregard for the usual art world way of doing business, and a desperation to find affordable and meaningful ways to express what is inside his head.
“First figure,” a recent work by painter Brady Dollyhigh. (Ray Mark Rinaldi, Special to The Denver Post)
No doubt, Brady Dollyhigh has a very busy head, full of conflict, dreams both good and bad, and the kind of sorting out of personal identity, psychological ethics, and quests for truth that you would expect from someone who just turned 25 this month.
He works it all out publicly, and seductively, in “The Back of My Face,” his solo exhibition now at Denver’s Leon Gallery The paintings and drawings on display are an imaginative mashup of mysterious objects mingling together. Spiders, pyramids, disembodied heads, human forms that feel familiar but also a little monstrous.
The pieces, working together as a curated show, make for an illusive and evocative gallery experience. I would label it surrealism, but it’s not quite the mind trip of traditional surrealism, because rather than being purposefully indecipherable, it strives to be understood. There is a rough code to it all that viewers can actually work out if they put the repeated symbols together.
The most important ones are the heads, and there are two kinds of those primarily.
There are more realistic heads, flesh-colored, with clearly visible eyes, noses and mouths. Those represent the way we present ourselves in public. Dollyhigh paints them in multiples, using them as the bricks of a house, the teeth of a canine, the liquid that pours from a teapot and puddles on top of a table. Think of them as the unknown masses we see every day.
Then there are heads that are more like circles with less distinct features — stripped-down smiley faces that are genderless, powerless, unknowable. Sometimes they present as flat objects, other times as spheres. They hint at the subconscious self, never quite clear in their thinking, and always in conflict with the more worldly, rational heads and the way they present themselves publicly.
“Late at night, alone in a box with a brush, I dwelt on everything I dread. I wanted to unravel myself and see what creatures came out when I laid still,” Dollyhigh writes in his statement, which is brief and revealing and necessarily dramatic.
Brady Dollyhigh’s “Wall.” The work is too heavy to hang, so it rests on heads that the artist carved out of wood. (Ray Mark Rinaldi, Special to The Denver Post)
There are other repeated images. Dollyhigh paints a lot of blocks, crude and castle-like bricks that might be stacked loosely on the ground, as they are in the painting titled “Pile,” or configured as to imply a void, as with “Cave,” or assembled architecturally into the turret of a fort, as they are in “Tower.”
The bricks come together into the exhibit’s centerpiece, a large-scale work that arranges 108 of them into a grid that forms a flat wall. In the center, appearing to be embedded inside the wall, is a dead black spider. Dollyhigh has painted a year on each of the bricks. They start at 2000 and go to 2092.
The painting, titled “Wall,” is 11 feet wide and 8 feet tall and, as with all the works, made with those sturdy metal traffic signs fastened together with screws. The work is too heavy to hang, so Dollyhigh simply leaned it against the wall, propped off the ground on top of two heads he carved out of wood.
It’s an eerie piece, though not quite as creepy as it sounds. It is haunting and powerful in the way of an Edgar Allan Poe story. But there is also a timeless quality to the painting that evokes the endless cycle of life, death, the passing of time. It’s a big-picture piece in every sense of that term.
“The Back of My Face” has a lot of work. In addition to the paintings, there is a rack of ink drawings on paper. Dollyhigh has produced one every day, for 400 days in a row.
The works are quite simple in form, monochromatic line drawings that are sparse and assertive. Like the paintings, they dwell in the land of heads, pyramids, spiders and stars, though they have a lighter feel. They also seem to be struggling to understand the moment they exist in. “For this show, I confronted everything that, to me, will never be definitive,” the artist statement reads.
Brady Dollyhigh, 25, has made a drawing everyday for the last 400 days. The works are part of his solo show at Leon Gallery. (Ray Mark Rinaldi, Special to The Denver Post)
That lack of definition drives this exhibit, and contributes to its allure. The work can feel immature — disembodied heads? spiders? — but it is also vulnerable and raw, even childish, and yet somehow contemporary.
In some ways, it is on trend in the art world, which at this moment has an obsession with moody, primitive drawings in bold colors, similar to the way this work presents itself.
But it is also anti-establishment in that it does not care what you think of it. Dollyhigh paints with an emotional immediacy and lack of concern over public perception that lifts this work into something unique and valuable in its own right.
IF YOU GO
“The Back of My Face” continues through Sept. 27 at Leon Gallery, 1112 17th Ave. It’s free. Info: 303-832-1599 or leongallery.org.
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