In collaboration with Elephant Room Gallery, Darin Latimer’s exhibit Fix your hearts or die (War on every corner) is comprised of all new abstract work that addresses the death of civility, empathy, kindness, and even common courtesy, with an aspiration towards what we might do about it. Or, whether we can do anything about it at all.

Titled before creating a single painting, Latimer’s exhibit reflects on his recovery from a near-death illness, when during this time, he became engrossed in social media on his smartphone, which he dubs This machine. During his long recovery, Latimer’s phone was a window into the decline of public discourse, fueled by social media. Engulfed by the preponderance of vitriol and hatred in comment threads, Latimer migrated his drawing practice to a digital, phone-based app, where to continue working, he created thousands of complex compositions, which he describes as “intestinal” collages to communicate what he saw as the demise of societal civility, objectivity, optimism, and intelligence.

Translated to the canvas, these works, born from a paradoxical relationship with technology, explore whether art can navigate or alleviate societal chaos. Latimer invites viewers to engage with this intricate web of thorns and draw their own conclusions.

If the Western World as we know it is going down, it will Die in Technicolor.

(Darin Latimer)

Darin Latimer was born in Detroit, MI and has long been obsessed with the city. He started drawing as a child, long before he talked, according to his mother, and he never stopped. Drawing was often the antidote to boredom or obligations. He used to skip school, returning to the city to spend whole days spelunking, book-hunting, salvage-picking, concert and club-going, but mostly just driving around with a camera. The photos were often details of architectural and natural distress patterns, jumbled topographies of sheared off brick from an adjacent demolition, fire scars on the sides of semi-collapsed buildings, scrub trees so choked with snagged plastic trash that they appeared breathing in the wind. These images informed a drawing practice that grew out of manic and compulsive adolescent doodling, merged with Latimer’s interest in the history of art and film. This led to a unique visual lexicon, or more succinctly as Latimer states: "I started making my own Distress." The resulting images, whether paintings, collage, pandemic-inspired cardboard sculptures, and digital drawings, almost entirely resolve into pictures of faces or figures, sometimes compressed in multitudes (or cityscapes), but almost never complete abstraction.