Bert Green Fine Art is pleased to present our third show by Chicago-based collage artist Doug Stapleton.

Artist’s statement

I re-configure found images into ambiguous narratives that often refer to the original source but mess around with the message. Visually I respond to the operatic shimmer, sparkle, and complexity—the grandly narrated spectacle—that is the history of western art. I want to continue that high-key drama in my work.

I’m tethered to the possibility of the story within the fragment. I play with symbols and metaphors from art history, language, and religion to create new images that are strongly representational, with an attention to precise cutting and visual consistency, and a nod toward absurd meaning.

False augury

These new images combine hands, eyes, plants, birds, fossils, and meteors; an ongoing vocabulary that I return to again and again. They become entities—augurs—nature’s messengers of change and transformation, invoked as a union between the natural world and human experience. This intersection is a source of mystery and profound delight for me. Not because of any firsthand encounter. This inquiry is born from desire—a desire to be something other than human alone. They appear monstrous to me, and I welcome that appearance. Monsters are augurs, beautiful, strange and unsettling. They are a hint at something else that could be.

But as augurs of what is to come, they are unreliable prophets with only an occasional garbled message. That is not their shortcoming. It is mine. My own limited capacity. Nonetheless, I pursue them in their silent trajectory. False augurs take flight through thought or wings. Mystery left in the wake of their departure. Did they ever intend to tell us anything?

Yet we read the skies in the flight of birds, hoping that feathers whisper truth.

Eyes open in everything; we have no monopoly on sight. Hands and flowers have better vision. Eyes watch, fingers feel, blooms reveal. In the union of flesh and flower lies the real mystery. In the rustle of wings, secrets of the coming year.

(Text by Doug Stapleton. June 2024)

Doug Stapleton is an artist, curator and educator. Stapleton's work has been the subject of three solo exhibitions at the University of Illinois Springfield, Chicago Cultural Center, and Loyola University Museum of Art, Chicago. A former Artistic Associate with the Chicago based contemporary dance company The Seldoms. he had worked on eleven evening length dance performances in the capacity of dramaturg and as a performer. Prior to his work with The Seldoms, he has performed in over forty solo and collaborative performances since 1989. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1989, and a BA in Anthropology from University of Delaware with a minor concentration in Art History and Ceramics.