Peripheral Traces (Dark Heart)
Peter Dykhuis

The work in Peripheral Traces (Dark Heart) began as collaged layers of paper-based ephemera — such as personal lists, envelopes, receipts, cards and notes — that were organized into three categories according to their social and economic locations within the artist’s life.

The paper fields were then mounted onto clipboards and overlaid with squares of encaustic wax paint or the following image-patterns:

– weather-based graphics on the Home Front series;
– economic charts and symbols on the Work Force series;
– gaming/board graphics on the Art World series.

The resulting visual phrases document the material traces of a common life overwritten with emblematic references to larger environmental, economic and social/cultural forces.

 
 
Exhibition Images
 
About the Artist
Peter Dykhuis has exhibited in artist-run centres and public galleries throughout Canada and the United States. On the international stage, Dykhuis has exhibited at The Embassy of Canada in Tokyo in 1998 and installed Pressure Today at the conference titled Cartography and Art – Art and Cartography in Vienna, Austria, in 2008. You Are Here (Works on Paper) was presented at the Sydney College of the Arts in Australia in 2009. Early clipboard-based works were displayed in the exhibition The Art of Mapping, organized by TAG Fine Art in London, England, in November of 2011. Subsequent new work is in circulation in various group exhibitions in the United States.

Parallel to this, Dykhuis developed a career as an arts administrator, curator and critical writer, first in Toronto and presently in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He became the Director of the Anna Leonowens Gallery at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1996 and, since 2007, is the Director/Curator of Dalhousie Art Gallery at Dalhousie University where he is responsible for its administration and programming.