John Devlin
Out of a Heart of Quiet
July 30 - August 27, 2022
Opening: Saturday, July 30th, 2-5pm
Curated by Kate Whiteway
John Devlin makes artwork most days from his late grandmother’s desk at his home in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Once a picture is complete, he scans it, uploads it to a Dropbox folder, and files it away. His works on paper, numbering in the thousands, contain infinite variations of dots, moons, cosmos, calculations, cocks, and gold monoliths. The artist knows a picture is done when he feels his joy has convened and then abandoned. The time in between finishing one picture and starting another is painful. He calls these inert moments between works “the terrible times.”
Out of a Heart of Quiet is the first solo exhibition of John Devlin’s work in Canada outside of Nova Scotia. It is also the first exhibition, anywhere, of the artist’s post-1980s body of work, that comes out of his erotic relationship to the cosmos and his Catholic spirituality. Throughout John Devlin’s life, he has been narrated as an “outsider artist.” This exhibition seeks to understand and play with that label to open another perspective onto the artist’s current practice.
Image: John Devlin, Untitled (Cosmos series), 2017, mixed media and gold leaf on paper
Documentation by LF Documentation
