Dustin Metz

Biblical

January 12- February 23, 2025
at Dog’s Breakfast
2832 Chesapeake Ave Los Angeles CA 90016

Essay by Kati Gegenheimer

Dustin Metz is a devout painter. His belief in an object and the teachings held through and by that object came long before his studio became a place of reverence for him - it began with his Catholic upbringing. As a non-catholic, I’ve always understood catholicism to be self-punishing, both from popular culture and the Catholics I’ve known personally. But I’ve excused this quality when walking into grandiose churches that recalibrated my understanding of belief and devotion. Some of the most enduring art that humans have made is housed in and for churches, serving the specific purpose of telling stories. To dedicate time and resources to works that are imaginative and emotional, is something taken for granted today - and perhaps even a bit dismissed for lacking seriousness, criticality, or grounding ‘research.’ Metz himself and the work he makes are products of a devotion to, and deep faith in, painting.

A tearstained and wounded sculpture of an orange sits quietly on a pedestal, surrounded by monumental paintings of heavy thick books, each inscribed with “Holy Bible” on the front cover, quivering toward the edges of the substrates they are stretched over. Stuffed with pages of unreadable information and looming larger than life, these infinitely closed, inevitably flat paintings of books incite reflection and reverence. Instigating a critical engagement with belief, identity, and art’s capacity to evoke and then question the sacred, Metz’s work is simultaneously influenced by his Catholic upbringing and his subsequent apostasy. Metz's practice mines a profound engagement with the rituals and aesthetics of faith while challenging its cultural and historical legacies. By grappling with the monumental—both as a physical scale and as a metaphor for societal weight—Metz offers a personal and critical exploration of belief, identity, and the enduring power of art through embodiment in this series of Bible paintings. The single sculptural work in the exhibition, Empathy Orange (2024), plays the role of seer, bearing witness to art’s power to confront and care. This piece invites quiet observation, bridging the sacred and the secular, a faux tear streaming down its’ mottled skin.

Through the act of painting and repetition, Metz transforms the Bible—a closed canon of stories that has shaped centuries of thought—into a two-dimensional surface, each imbued with its own history of time and touch. Each painting presents the book as both an object and an idea: an icon of spiritual authority and societal power. The scale and color of each painting evokes emotional resonance, both surrounding and inviting viewers to grapple with their psychic weight of taught belief systems, accountability, guilt, shame, faith, and possibility.

Metz’s exploration of paint as material and paint in a larger history of depiction is central to this body of work. The textures, finishes, and colors of each painting hold symbolic value, drawing viewers into a deeper engagement with their conceptual underpinnings through the vehicle of materiality. In Big Bible (Blue) (2015), for instance, the glowing, jewel-like surface creates a metaphysical space where the viewer’s experience oscillates between awe and introspection. Dirty White Bible (2020), extends this interrogation by examining whiteness as both a construct and a lived reality: a system of belief and disbelief. The painting’s white surface—marred by dirt and trapped insects—becomes a metaphor for the opacity and entrapment of whiteness, surrounded by a greyish skin that frames the book as an all-encompassing landscape. Similarly, Black Mirror Bible (2020) presents a surface that shifts between reflection and depth, placing viewers in a disorienting relationship with the book’s totemic presence and their own image. Metz turns to flesh and touch in Red Bible (2020), using vibrant reds and pinks to evoke glowing flesh. The book’s cover becomes a wound, contrasting The Bible’s traditional associations of permanence and authority by emphasizing humanity and vulnerability.

These Bibles tell us nothing about themselves but everything about ourselves. They are mirrors of time, experience, and the weight of what we choose to carry or let go.

- Kati Gegenheimer, December 23, 2024

Biblical will be on view at Dog’s Breakfast from Jan 12, 2025 to Feb 23, 2025. Dog’s Breakfast is a project space located in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles.

For more information, please contact
Catherine Fairbanks
faircatherine@yahoo.com
503-502-2628

Dog’s Breakfast
2832 Chesapeake Ave Los Angeles CA 90016

Open Saturdays 12-4pm and by appointment.

About the Artist

Dustin Metz is a painter whose work bridges the sacred and the everyday, drawing on the traditions of portrait, still-life and landscape painting. Metz holds an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University (New Brunswick, NJ) and a BFA from Tyler School of Art, (Elkins Park, PA). Metz was a co-founder of the artist-run gallery Ms. Barbers (Los Angeles, CA). His paintings have been exhibited at TORUS (formerly Hunter Shaw Fine Art)(Los Angeles, CA), Jeffery Deitch (New York, NY), The Bunker Artspace (Miami, FL). He has been a MacDowell Fellow (Petersborough, New Hampshire) and an artist in residence at Yaddo (Saratoga Springs, NY), as well as a student at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Skowhegan, Maine). Metz works in a studio space shared with a native plant nursery in the El Sereno neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.