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For me, painting has always been about slowness: slowness in looking and slowness in making. My work seeks to exploit and celebrate the various ways in which the painted image separates itself from other kinds of imagery while also alluding to our high speed world dominated by immediate access to anything, from sourcing information on the internet to our ability to capture and store images at a moment’s notice.

My recent work often calls attention to the relationship between the image, the thing that we can hold in our mind, and the object that holds or supports it. Currently, I am working on a number of carved reproductions of surfaces from public spaces. These low relief carvings investigate the ways in which abstraction can render specific and autobiographical content anonymous. They also attempt to both depict some thing, object, or surface while, at the same time, being that object or surface.

- Douglas Degges, 2017

Douglas Degges is an artist and educator living and working in Chattanooga, TN. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa and has been an artist-in-residence at the Millay Colony and the Vermont Studio Center.

His work has recently been exhibited at The Shed Space in Brooklyn, NY, mild climate in Nashville, and the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art in Athens, GA. He currently teaches at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga.

* Douglas Degges is currently part of Corner Palace at mild climate and has a forthcoming show with Brady Haston at Zeitgeist Gallery opening on May 6.