Peter Dykhuis
Personal Relics
3 January - 1 Februrary
Fridays – Sundays: 12 – 6 pm (or by appointment)
Opening reception: Saturday 3 January, 2 – 6 pm
Artist talk and closing gathering: Sunday 1 February, 3 pm
Artist will be present every Friday and Sunday during the exhibition
Personal Relic #6 (Memory Banks) 2025, archived objects with encaustic treatments, 14” x 47” installed
This exhibition builds on Dykhuis’ previous work where he overlaid envelopes, personal notes and other interwoven paper ephemera with encaustic representations of maps, flags, weather readings, and military references. These combined the minutia of his personal life with the larger landscape of politics and economics.
Personal Relics adds physical ‘things’ to the mix. These include materials and objects that touched Dykhuis’ body or were used by him. For example: patches of favorite shirts, dead cell phones, positive Covid tests plus other medical records, personal grooming and health maintenance objects, worn out wallets and other storage devices. Plus other objects that Dykhuis collected along the way.
During recent visits to Italy, Dykhuis’ interest in Medieval and early Renaissance culture was supercharged in the cathedrals, chapels, cloisters, and museums, particularly in Siena and Florence, where ‘sacred’ Catholic iconography rubbed up against the ‘secular’ economic and civic-pride driven power battles of competing merchant families. He also became mesmerized with Medieval, blind-faith beliefs in the mystical powers of relics due to their previous affiliation with revered ‘saints’ and religious narratives.
Of equal interest is the tension between the ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ when feuding civic leaders and captains of industry were laid to rest in tombs embedded in cathedral floors – complete with heraldic crests of their family dynasties.
Dykhuis’ personal relics are a rag-tag collection of things that represent his modest life thus far. They are overlaid with painted stripes that conflate graphic components of Medieval crests and coats of arms with ‘flat’ modernist, minimalistic painting – each power tropes in their own mutual ways.
Dykhuis also ‘killed’ past art works and collaged their best parts into new pieces. Aware of his mortality, nothing is sacred, everything is in play… but his personal ‘stuff’ is still engaged with social and political curiosity and critiques.