Darren Dirksen: "November Grass"
Through December 9
Joseph Gierek Fine Art
In the introduction to her "Best Music of 2023" list, New Yorker music critic Amanda Petrusich writes that she's been finding herself "thrashing against the seduction of newness, and moreover the presumption that newness is always where the heat is.” Reading that after spending an afternoon with a group of oil paintings by Darren Dirksen, I knew just what Petrusich meant—how good it is to meet this moment (“our era of generalized collapse,” she calls it) alongside artists whose work feels lived-in, trustworthy, who’ve worked out how their own vision meets a moment, decade after decade, through it all.
Dirksen, a longtime Oklahoma artist who has spent the last couple of years fighting aplastic anemia and enduring a bone marrow transplant, makes work about moments: ones that take millennia to unfold, ones that happen so ephemerally that it takes an artist’s eye to capture them, and ones where both kinds of time surreally coexist. If you don’t know his work, find your way to Joseph Gierek Fine Art (east of the Meadow Gold sign on Route 66) and give yourself some time with it before his current show there, called “November Grass,” closes this Saturday.