Oct 26th 2014

Nicole Dyer & Matt Hilvers: Open Mic Night

@ South of the Tracks

319 N. Albany Ave

Opening Sunday, October 26th, from 4PM - 7PM

On view through Sunday, December 7th

South of the Tracks is pleased to present, Open Mic Night, a two-person show featuring work by Baltimore and Chicago-based artists, Nicole Dyer and Matt Hilvers, respectively. The idiom, Tragedy + Time = Comedy, allays the pangs of sorrow brought on by the painful and banal moments in an existence. It is the contemplative tonic for the episodic life full of uncertain meaning. These recent paintings by Dyer and Hilvers utilize memories and objects to express the existential dread of growing up in the 21st century, coping with a digital world that moves faster than ever before while simultaneously regressing socially. The paintings fluctuate, moving between abstraction and pictoral, speaking to the flow of images and the beingseenness in the digital age.

As a mode of coping with the memories of social miscues and banality, Dyer’s work executes paintings with a jesteral and inane humor that displays the impotency of memory and humanity. Along side Dyer, Hilvers approach displays many of the same concerns of growing up and the impotency of memory but lets the Death Drive exude itself within his imagery. Though there is an ever-present air of lightheartedness to Hilver’s work, an underlying unease presents itself in the roughness of the process of making his paintings. Dyer and Hilvers produce good-natured farce, purveying the myth of the tragic artist, while easily positioning themselves within the context of modern and contemporary painting.

Matt Hilvers (b. Highland Park, IL 1990)
2014 BFA Photography Columbia College Chicago

Nicole Dyer (b. Lakeland, FL 1990)
2013 BFA Drawing Suma Cum Laude Maryland Institute College of Art
Nicole has exhibited at Burren College of Art (Ballyvaughan, Ireland), Fox Gallery (MICA), Kansas City Art Institute, University of South Carolina, Concourse Gallery (Minneapolis, MN)

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