By popular request, Rock|DeMent visual art space is pleased to extend Dialogue: poetic patience within
a world of visual aggression throughout November with a special presentation for the public on Saturday, November 12th.  Beginning at 3:30pm, Stephen Rock and Joseph Keppler will discuss their processes and ideas on their own artwork alongside a candid dialogue on social conservatism as it affects the local and national art scene.  These artists have chosen art as a life's work and spent their lives following a calling largely outside of the dictates and redundancy found in many commercial galleries.  In our time when images and messages chronically proliferate and when even, or especially, artists are assigned to be kitsch making kitsch, how do artists distinguish themselves outside of a spectacular, consumerist identity?  With a deep and inherent understanding of what came before, can an artist be original?  Learn about the actual motivations of artists and more as Rock and Keppler pull the curtain aside for a candid dialogue about our present uncertainty from 3:30 - 5pm.

Joseph Keppler and Stephen Rock present sculptures and paintings outside of the aesthetic industrial complex in "Dialogue: poetic patience within a world of visual aggression."  Together, these artists offer a poetic dialogue between two men who have chosen art as a life's work.  They create necessarily, habitually, and patiently.

Keppler presents steel sculptures at once both defiant and supple.  His surfaces come alive with sensuous texture and incisions, forms replete with sensitivity and humor.  Keppler writes, “A simple conception really, not immaculately, but sexually, one’s body is a sculptural truth stretching even before and after the personal, temporal limits of conception and death. In a body the personal and the physical coexist. An interior attention and inattention goes on in the solitude of the physical person. In our solitude our thoughts keep ourselves company with ourselves.”

Rock replies, “Others KNOW their own truths and not until we sit across from the reflective logic of each other do we see the constructs of our own design, see the flaws.”  Rock's energetic paintings filled with color are authentic creative passion.  His abstractions could be reminiscent of the sublime geometry deep within an atomic cell or, conversely, the structure of man made patterns seen from far above.  The resulting exhibition is an intellectual visual journey that resists the redundancy of contemporary art. 

Both artists participate in the Seattle Group, which meets regularly for lively conversations on art and philosophy.  In this show, as is fitting for two Seattle Group members, these artists brave a candid dialogue about our present uncertainty.  Together, they offer work that thwarts visual aggression through a poetic dialogue.