Dan Syrnick

SPECTRA

There’s a huntress in the jaws of a mouth, while her head is in the jaws of a bear skull headdress, while her slain rabbit is held bloody in her own jaws. There’s a headless man with blood flowing from his neck into a watering can that is watering his own decapitated head which flowers and foliage grow from. There are two deities that each have two faces; one face is either consuming human figures piled into a sandwich or lighting up a figure as a joint while their other faces is making out with one another. There’s a person immersed up to their eyes in a bathtub, the legs of a bird gripping their head. Zoom out and the legs belong to a magnificent crane with a frog on its head. Zoom into the frog and there is a person sitting on the frog’s head that resembles the lower half of the aforementioned bather.

These are but a few of the mind-bending illustrations that are part of Dan Syrnick’s epic Spectra. For the last 2 months Dan has been working in the BAM project space/gallery planning and creating work that are featured in his latest exhibition. This work Spectra is the main attraction of the show, his most recent work and really an opus to what Dan has been working at over the last year. Spectra is a grid of 21 individually painted canvases of various sizes that are tightly organized into a single work. While there are different stories and characters depicted, these paintings all work towards a cohesive whole. There is a harmony in the design, use of colour, line work and style, while they also contain unifying themes.

Many of Dan’s images contain elements of a lifecycle in them: birth>death>rebirth. Three panels create a scene with two lovers in an embrace riding on a fantastical animal; one lover is a skeleton holding his lover with one hand and his gun with the other. Behind them is a forest fire that’s smoke rises and floats into the furthest panel morphing into a rain cloud and watering the desert. In another panel a being is holding in his hand, staring into dead face of another being. From this face there are flora and fauna growing out of its skull with a chubby humanoid offering up a small egg to the being as gift.

Any casual viewer could explain that Dan’s art is trippy, his paintings are loaded with unexpected and fantastical details. But looking longer and talking to Dan about his experiences can bring you deeper. There are elements of Dan’s spirituality and psychedelic explorations evident in a lot of these images. While taking part in an Ayahuasca ceremony Dan was able to step back from his ego and see himself from a different vantage point. There were visions that brought mysterious symbolism and a feeling that he was a small insignificant being amongst larger Gods. He felt like he was part of something much larger; a place in an ecosystem within a larger ecosystem. These themes are evident in his work. There’s a panel with two small faceless figures: one seems recluse and alone while another has their hand up to their brow, lost in their thoughts. While these figures are dealing with their internal toils their backgrounds carry intrigue: the landscape is the faces of two larger beings staring closely at one another with tears pouring from one’s eye into the other. We can be so caught up with our own concerns that we might miss the bigger picture and the power around us. Sometimes, however, we can be at harmony with the universe. In another panel, Dan depicts two small faceless figures again, but this time in a sensuous embrace; the landscape they are laying on is two larger beings’ tongues as they themselves are deep in a make out session. Sometimes the actions of us on earth can be in harmony of all creation.

You can tell that Dan likes to throw humour into his work. He told me that he grew up around humour, his brother being a comedian. Dan uses humour to disarm, connect and a coping mechanism for showing vulnerability. You will see that Dan’s work often contains visual punchlines that flip expectations and have role reversals. There’s a boxer throwing a punch and in a clinch with a male ballerina, the figures’ embrace appears to be locked in a dance; but the ballerina carrying power being the lead. There’s an infant wrapped up in a spider web, but the spider has created a swaddle wrap and rather than menacing the spider is creepy caring for the child. Dan’s earlier work felt like they were comic paintings, purposely created to carry a punchline:

Yet the work in Spectra walks a fine line. There are humorous elements, but the work isn’t primarily centered around the joke. It’s a painting that contains many elements some of them funny. This is tough to pull off but worth the attempt. It makes it more than one note and provides complexity. Dan also thinks that adding humour makes it non-pretentious, even though paintings tend to be the most pretentious of art mediums. When I asked him “Why paintings? Why not illustrations? They could be on paper rather stretched canvas and tediously crafted?” Dan explained that the medium of paintings creates a different read. Instead of a quick read and maybe a chuckle a painting on a wall carries a certain place and power. It invites people to look longer, to dwell on it and make connections, to analyze the colours and design more thoughtfully. Dan also said that working in the genre of painting actually gives him more freedom. If he were to create an illustration it would more of a narrow definition but with paintings, he can breakout of typical illustrations and devolve into abstract elements of colour, shape and line.

Dan Syrnick’s Spectra is a masterwork and a major step in his art practice. It is wildly ambitious in its design and impact. Dan was able to pull off 21 paintings to create a cohesive whole. The illustrations, colours, design and themes had a unifying harmony but kept your eye bouncing all over the wall with so many interesting details and intersecting ideas worth exploring. Studies show that an average view time for paintings in a gallery is 27 seconds. The crowds at Dan’s opening stood in front of spectra for often longer than 10 minutes at a time, pointing and chatting with each other all the while. Life is busy and complicated; but if you pause and notice things around you, you might find connections, beauty and maybe even a chuckle.

 This artist project and writing associated with it was funded with the generous support of a curating grant from SK Arts