Artist Statement & Bios

Viewing Room

January 14, 2022 - February 12, 2022

Small Talk
Jillian Dickson
Michael Reedy 
Brian Spolans

Buckham Gallery is pleased to announce Small Talk, a group exhibition featuring work by artists Jillian Dickson, Michael Reedy, and Brian Spolans. These artists offer investigations of other people as externalizations of experience and internal fears. These neuroses are presented with tenderness, reverence and the distance experienced with other people.

Jillian Dickson describes her work as “assemblages of familiar people. The work makes visible the intimate connection between people and their independence from them. Laced within these portraits are objects and references creating a personalized iconography. These artifacts were deliberately chosen to build toward a narrative, one which is intended to be both readable to the audience and secretive.”

Michael Reedy states that “the delicate strands of silver hair that have started to populate my wife’s head most easily explain what motivates my work. At one moment, I find them incredibly beautiful, and celebrate the fact that I have had the opportunity to share my life with her, and in another moment, I am struck with my fear of growing older and eventually losing her. Everything eventually seems to revolve around this point-of-tension between beauty and despair, between living and dying. However, it is this duality that makes life beautiful! It is our ability to persevere in light of this duality that motivates much of my work. However, it should be stressed that I prefer to find the beauty in that silver hair. The characters that populate my work are only flirting with death –even the skeletons and skull portraits are very much living in my mind.”

Brian Spolans describes his work as “revealing my interest and frustration with working to understand others. Seeking empathy can be a radical political and personal stance, with it we experience culture, and find community, denying empathy fosters prejudice, and intolerance. On an individual basis, there’s a limit to this understanding. Not everything about others can be known or understood.”

​Small Talk opens on Friday, January 14 and runs through Saturday, February 12, 2022.
Cover Image: Michael Reedy, Dust, mixed media on paper (charcoal, colored pencil, watercolor, gouache, acrylic, glow-in-the-dark paint, and glitter), 57" x 25"