Recent Work

Forest Eater

Contemporary Museum + Honolulu Academy of Arts
Honolulu, HI, 2011

Forest Eater, conceived specifically for the Honolulu Contemporary Art Museum, explores the mystical and phenomenological aspects of volcanoes. The exhibition title refers to the Hawaiian legend of Pele - ancient goddess of fire, lightning, and volcanoes - who still holds a prominent place in the collective imagination of many contemporary Hawai'ians. Pele represents both the destructive and creative forces of all volcanic activity, simultaneously taking and giving life. She is Ka wahine 'ai honua: "the woman who devours the land."

The paintings move between abstracted and pictorial representations of Pele and the Hawai'ian landscape, depicting not a tropical paradise but a more evocative, haunting portrait of the islands.

Forest Eater, with its many allegorical and symbolic references, comprises approximately fifty paintings and works on paper and four site-specific sculptures. The largest of the sculptures is Wrath, a forbidding eighteen-foot long vertical lava formation, hanging from the museum's ceiling.

Kingdom

Greg Kucera Gallery
Seattle, WA, 2011

The exhibition Kingdom, comprising recent oil paintings, sculptures, and a gouache-on-paper bestiary series, follows the form of the animal into states of being and becoming, metamorphosis, dematerialization, and decay. In oil-on-panel paintings, animals appear - either highly rendered or barely evoked - in landscapes that are in constant flux, the materiality of the animal's body always marking the paradox of a being's concrete existence in inherently unstable time and space. Freed from predictable cycles of birth, life, and death, the animals in the paintings may be victims of the atmospheric upheaval that surrounds them, or they may be products of it; but they are never ontologically apart. In the exhibition's sculptures and in the twenty-three works on paper constituting the bestiary, the animal body itself is in a state of transition, in flux, and without boundaries. In three-dimensional space and on the page, animal forms assert their precisely described particularity, all the while surrendering the limits of their bodies. By turns monstrous, fanciful, or abstract, the animals merge into composite forms bringing forth strange fellowships between species normally separated by geography, time, or the line between fact and fiction. Artist Profile/Review by Suzanne Beal.

Bestiary

Greg Kucera Gallery
Seattle, WA, 2011

The animal species depicted in the gouache-on-paper Bestiary are all derived from the medieval bestiary tradition, in which a finite number of known species-as well as mythological creatures-were catalogued encyclopedically. As a genre, the medieval bestiary not only constituted a natural history of creation, but also participated in a rich tradition of the moralizing allegory, the animal kingdom providing apt figures for human behavior, human folly, and the stark reality of the post-lapsarian human condition. The images Waterston developed for this project are the animal body itself in a state of transition, in flux, and without boundaries. Animal forms assert their precisely described particularity, all the while surrendering the limits of their bodies. By turns monstrous, fanciful, or abstract, the animals merge into composite forms bringing forth strange fellowships between species normally separated by geography, time, or the line between fact and fiction.

An editioned portfolio of Waterston's Bestiary is forthcoming, published by The Auchenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts in 2012.

Anatomies

Inman Gallery
Houston, TX, 2010

For Anatomies, Waterston presented a multi-media installation evoking the empiricism and fantasy of 16th and 17th century wunderkammern. Waterston's gallery-scale cabinet of curiosity accumulated and arranged found, collected, and artist-constructed objects: biological specimens and book pages, anatomies and artifacts, totems and talismans, as well as a bounty of new, related paintings, works on paper, and the presented the artist's first foray into sculpture. Together these oddities comprised an idiosyncratic catalogue of organic and man-made forms; representation and abstraction; and material and spirit - all filtered through Waterston's unique artistic sensibility. Review by Tyrus Miller.

Splendid Grief: Darren Waterston and the Afterlife of Leland Stanford, Jr.

Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University
Stanford, CA, 2009

Despite their reputation for emotional restraint, Victorians indulged in complex and elaborate rituals surrounding death and mourning. No better example is the case of Leland Stanford Jr., the only son of Leland and Jane Stanford, who died at the tender age of 15 from typhoid fever while on a visit to Florence, Italy. The family's immense loss became the impetus for several commissioned monuments and works of art that perpetuated their son's memory. One of these splendid memorials was the Leland Stanford Jr. Museum (now the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts) that was founded as part of the university that bears the child's name. Waterston became fascinated with the university and particularly the story of Leland Jr. and his grieving parents. Working with the university staff, Waterston explored the library's Special Collections and the museum's Stanford Family holdings.

In these repositories he found paintings, photographs, and documents relating to the life of Leland Stanford Jr., as well as objects such as chalkboards from séances held by Mrs. Stanford after her son's death. The story of the founders as studied and interpreted by artist Darren Waterston resulted in this installation that combines his twenty-first century paintings and works on paper with nineteenth-century objects and artifacts relating to the life and death of Leland Stanford Jr. Inspired by the elaborate theatrics of a Victorian mourning parlor, the artist has transformed the Halperin Gallery into a space for reflection on death and dying.

The Flowering & Recent Prints

Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art
Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR, 2007

The Flowering (The Fourfold Sense), is a unique portfolio of original prints by Darren Waterston, accompanied by original texts by Tyrus Miller, exploring the senses and bodily experiences of Saint Francis of Assisi. Produced in collaboration with Gallery 16 in San Francisco.

Aurora

Michael Kohn Gallery
Los Angeles, CA, 2008

Aurora consists of a series of paintings in which the artist explores ideas surrounding the sublime. Through depictions of abstracted infinite vistas, these works aim at pictorial representation of mental states. The tangible imagery of auroral arcs, prismatic refractions, electrical fields and charged particles are utilized to project glimpses into immaterial universes, planes or ethereal realms.

Last Days

Greg Kucera Gallery,
Seattle, WA, 2008

An exhibition of paintings and works on paper. Essay by Tyrus Miller.