caleb&hillary: Gallery Stroll - Dan Christofferson

Our show at the gallery this month was a solo show. Dan Christofferson was the artist. He is amazing and I have been excited for this show ever since he said he would do it. We saw his stuff at a Gallery Stroll before Caleb and I were married. We had gone to the gallery stroll with my sister Melanie. He had a set of 3 prints. We all loved them, but none of us could afford the whole set. So we each got one in the set. When Caleb and I got married...I thought it would be nice to have the whole set. I had Dan's business card and contacted him to see if he happened to have another one of the one I was missing in the set. I was so excited to hear he had one. So now we have the whole set. That set of prints gets a lot of compliments at our house and we have loved having them.

Larua Durham of 15 bytes magazine did a little write up on the show. Here is what the article said: click here to read the full article

Currently, Dan Christofferson’s work occupies the gallery walls in a show called The Terrible Gentle Man. The artist describes the majority of his work as “getting at the guts of a person.” Christofferson explains: “It’s an attempt at pinpointing some vague emotional state that may be sort of hard to verbalize or easily share with people. Lately I’m obsessed with what makes us who we are down to our most brutal selves.”

The artist has human behavior distilled down to three elements: 1) things that make us happy, 2) things that make us sad or upset, and 3) things we can’t control. These different elements are represented visually with corresponding colors, shapes and symbols.

Christofferson describes The Terrible Gentle Man as the personification of who we are underneath our shells when we’re filled with these three basic groups; each of us in different combinations. The image of the Russian nesting doll or “Matryoshka” is a simple but beautiful symbol to call attention to the different layers we all possess. He hopes to push the viewer to examine what makes up the layers underneath our individual “shells.”