ELIJAH RIVER DION:
Skateman 5000 and the South Side Shooters
June 16 - July 22, 2023
Public reception: Friday, July 7, 5:30 – 8 pm
The Treachery of Narrative, oil on panel, 36 x 24 inches
Boston, MA — Steven Zevitas Gallery is pleased to present Skateman 5000 and the South Side Shooters, an exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist, Elijah River Dion. The exhibition will be on view from June 16 – July 22, 2023, with an opening reception on Friday, July 7 from 5:30 – 8:00 PM.
At a young age, Elijah River Dion looked to creative outlets to satisfy a missing piece of himself — a void that grew in tandem with a manic, animal urge to fill it. As he got older, his artistic pursuit was displaced by the quick fix of drugs and a resulting heroin addiction. Dion is now 8 years clean. In the purgatory of sobriety, his drive to create returned with a realization that there is no one avenue to complete satisfaction.
Dion’s painstakingly crafted paintings reference both his life and art history. Not interested in being overtly didactic, Dion presents us with scenes that are absent of any moral hierarchy, rather, they are images rooted in reality and lived experience. Dion has a deep interest in art history and his paintings teem with references, some subtle and some more overt. In his hands, art history becomes a malleable substance that allows Dion to address the universal experience of what it means to be a human in search of wholeness.
In The Treachery of Narrative (above) Dion points to René Magritte’s masterpiece The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe). As Magritte challenges the convention of identifying an image of an object as the object itself, Dion questions the narrative he tells himself (and in turn, the life he shows the viewer). A sign on the tree reads “Ceci N’est Pas Les Salut,” which translates to “This is not salvation.” The act of painting is not salvation, but neither is this image. For Dion, salvation is in confronting and cherishing these moments of authentic nothingness.
