Dike Blair

[1][2] His art consists of two parallel bodies of work: intimate, photorealistic paintings and installation-like sculptures assembled from common objects—often exhibited together—which examine overlooked and unexceptional phenomena of daily existence in both a romantic and ironic manner.

[6][1][7] New York Times critic Roberta Smith places his sculpture in a "blurred category" crossing "Carl Andre with ikebana, formalist abstraction with sleek anonymous hotel rooms, talk-show sets with home furnishings showrooms.

The show featured mixed-media images installed in a darkened room scored to Muzak, and decorated and carpeted in mauve with plants and suburban benches; reviews described it, alternately, as suffused with loss and nostalgia, soothing, and surprisingly spiritual.

[25][10] Together they investigate oppositions and liminal spaces—between nature and architecture, inside and outside, fullness and emptiness—and themes including pleasure and boredom, escapism and transcendence, and the intersection of designed environments, mass experience and desire.

[26][3][27] Blair's earlier gouaches focus on diaristic, largely American scenes (bedside set-ups, cocktails, cigarette butt-littered ashtrays, soda cans, VHS tapes) and anodyne transitory environments (motels, lounges, lobbies, Las Vegas, Disneyland) that Roberta Smith characterizes as background and details at "the edges of a sophisticated, travel-weary terrain.

"[6][9][28] Village Voice critic Jerry Saltz writes that the paintings combine "a draftsman's attention to fact, a botanist's eye for type, and a detective's feel for telling clues," resulting in a no-man's-land genre "between illustration, photography, and forensic science.

[33][11][30] Blair carefully manipulates elements such as electrical cords unfurling like lines across color-fields of industrial carpet, Plexiglas and plywood, lightboxes, shipping crates and lamps, seeking a balance in which objects retain their specificity yet read together as singular works.

[33][27][32] They paired gouache paintings of lyrical water-streaked windows and flowers with electrical cord and geometric carpet lengths, glowing boxes and low-slung Minimalist objects, creating spaces that reviews describe as calming, mysterious and melancholic domestic tableaux (e.g.

[34][1][32] The Brooklyn Rail compared the effect of these exhibitions to the ambient music of artists such as Brian Eno, "tastefully calibrating" momentary experience, while remaining ambivalent about the consequences for subjectivity of living in a thoroughly designed world.