NEW YORK, NY.- Dutton presents Outer Ones, a solo exhibition of recent sculptures, wall constructions, and drawings by Lauriston Avery. Formed from lo-fi utilitarian materials commonly sourced from hardware stores and interspersed with found ingredients ranging from faux fur to dust, Avery’s works rely on the subtlety of white, muted hues, texture, light and shadow to express ghostly visages that are at once matter of fact and ethereal. Tightly compressed passages interwoven with structural and rhythmic line interplay over scarred psychic fields where super-sensory, celestial-like figures manifest in material substance and recede into abstraction.

For Avery, this practice can be interpreted as conjuring. Alternating between feverishly building and impulsively excavating, he champions intuition as an interface with the metaphysical. His obsessive process and transmutation of material on the picture plane and in space summons that which is hidden within the tangible. Shimmering between the fantastical and the objective, Avery draws upon his attraction to the mystical and esoteric, where the laws governing what is visible are influenced by what is not.

Outer Ones

Between what the mind dreams, what has happened, and what is trying to be let go of
In there is the wondrous clarity of blind spots, an immense space that feels like an arrival
To gaze and laugh, and hold a movement that mirrors internal movements
Typically uneasy, sometimes imposing, encroaching with unsolicited advice
Sometimes like a loving hand that knows all
Trying to stay within the sphere of honesty
Excited and alive
Energized, open, and free
Massively uncluttered
Instinct using its own means
A hand familiar with material
Thoughts that reach into fantasy
A brain that takes itself way too seriously
Fear, wild, free floating, vibrant

Coming in and out of being

Lauriston Avery (b. 1968, Norwich, CT), lives and works in New York, having studied at the San Francisco Art Institute, he received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1990. Avery’s selected solo exhibitions include Full Moon, Platform Project Space, Brooklyn, NY; Deaf Bats Blind Shepards, Wildpalms, Düsseldorf, Germany; and To be Continued, The Hogar Collection, Brooklyn, NY. Recent group exhibitions include Embers, Platform Project Space, Brooklyn, NY; Magical Operations, Wildpalms, Düsseldorf, Germany; Zip City, Left Field Gallery, Los Osos, CA; Walk the Line, Platform Project Space, Brooklyn, NY; Big Ringer, Andrew Edlin Gallery, NY; Come a Little Closer, DC Moore, NY; and After the End, NADA. His work has been featured at the Bridge Art Fair, Miami; NEXT Art Fair, Chicago; Untitled Art Fair, Miami; and NADA, New York.