Artist Brian Dinkins finds his inspiration in the mundane landscape of Kansas. “Every day you notice the same things over and over again, just feeling the repetition of the telephone poles or the chain-link fences.” He ascribes “a vastness” to the area around Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City where his family lived. “When we first got there it was very much on the fringe,” he says. “Behind our house was farmland all the way to Lawrence.” Dinkins spent a lot of time with friends at construction sites, which he describes as “big play-grounds.” He had to travel to find open land. “The built-up areas were structured; it was more exciting to get outside of those, finding new areas to bicycle in.”
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Dinkins says he has a “love-hate relationship with technology,” an ambivalence that’s apparent in his six quirky pieces now on display at Gary Marks Gallery. In an untitled work, a wide rolling conveyor belt supports a moving suburban landscape of cars, people, houses, a Pizza Hut, and a Shell station. Every bit of space seems neatly planned and carefully manicured. Mounted low and thus viewed from above, its flatness recalls for Dinkins the perplexing moment from his childhood when he learned the earth was round but could find no verification through his own observations. Small vignettes dot the model-train landscape.
As an undergrad at the Kansas City Art Institute, Dinkins’s experience working in his father’s bicycle shop “carried over into what I wanted to do with my art,” which was to explore the relationship between art and technology.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): untitled, 1997; “Catherine the Great,” 1996; Brian Dinkins photos by Nathan Mandell.
