Side Room is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition, Douglas Degges: A Squirrel from Memory, which opens by appointment Thursday, October 29, 2020. The exhibition includes a selection of new paintings and drawings representing divergent yet complementary strains of Degges’s studio practice, which explores the inherent tensions between image and object.

A Squirrel from Memory marks a major shift in focus within his work and includes imagery pulled directly, even explicitly, from the landscapes of rural, Northern Louisiana where he grew up. In these idiosyncratic new paintings and drawings, Degges evokes the textures, colors, and creatures of the muddy waters of Lake Bistineau and its surrounding forests.

Degges, who worked as an assistant to painters Catherine Murphy and Thomas Nozkowski, claims various artistic influences, from Michael Krebber to Amy Sillman and Albert Oehlen. He writes that a major overriding concern in his work is “treating the idea of style as a conceptual space, not something to have but to work against. I end up looking for new modes of making and a range of imagery as a means to have the work be more dissonant.” In these new paintings, quick blind-contour-like drawings serve as a structure on which Degges adds dashes of color, twisting simple forms into greater complexity. The smaller-scale works on paper are made with graphite pencils, erasers, and blending stumps, and are more literal, time-intensive translations of printed photographic images. The latter are digitally prepared, occasionally collaged, and present a broader visual language than Degges’s paintings, which explore similar themes more abstractly, through vibrant color and heavily textured or matte surfaces that foreground their own materiality. In Degges’s words, these two bodies of work aim to “say the same thing but using different languages.”

Douglas Degges (b. 1986 Shreveport, LA) is an artist and educator based in Stafford Springs, CT where he is an Assistant Professor of Art in Painting and Drawing at the University of Connecticut. He received his MFA from the Uni- versity of Iowa and a BA in Studio Art from Rhodes College in Memphis, TN. His work has been exhibited in various group and solo exhibitions throughout the United States, most recently at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design in Milwaukee, WI, Vanderbilt University and Zeitgeist Gallery in Nashville, TN, VERSA in Chattanooga, TN, and the Ely Center for Contemporary Art in New Haven, CT. His work has been supported by several artist residencies including the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Douglas Degges: A Squirrel from Memory is on view by appointment at 544 Pacific Street, #3, Brooklyn, NY, start- ing October 29. Side Room is a pop-up art space and curatorial project by Gilles Heno-Coe. For further information or to make an appointment, please contact Gilles at gilles@sideroomgallery.com.