Author | Annie Malamet
Dirk Stamm has already produced a large and varied body of work at the age of twenty-five. A Boston native currently living in Portland, Maine, Dirk works in a variety of mediums including painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, and ceramics. Dirk fits the bill completely of a traditional studio artist, working in various “hands on” mediums.
Dealing with issues of survival and the physicality of the human body, Dirk creates chaotic, graphic images. These draw heavily on various biological forms and cellular structures. Chromosomes, petri dishes, diagrams of body parts, and dissections are just some of the recurring imagery in his oeuvre. “Most of my work comes from my own struggles I had during high school and still have with my sexuality and gender identity,” says Dirk. “Being put into a queer group home in high school and learning about biology gave me a set of frameworks and rules to try and figure out a bunch of my issues.”
In short, Dirk’s work is a hashing out of those personal issues by representing the human body in various ways through different mediums and imageries. Playing with physical materials and in such an obsessive manner is crucial to Dirk’s working method. “I’m a very hands-on, need to ‘talk it out’ type of person. If I have an issue my head spins until I get to ‘talk’ out all of my thoughts and look at the issue from every possible angle.”
Dirk’s work has a freeform, graphic, geometric quality akin to graffiti or even tattoo art. “Right now I’m really taken with Watson Atkinson’s and Tai-Van’s drawings and tattoos.” It would be no surprise to see Dirk’s prints on a t-shirt or as a chest tattoo, but that by no means makes his work shallow or purely aesthetic. It is that relationship between beauty, horror, science, and graphic art that make his pieces so accessible and intriguing.
Dirk currently has a piece in the Free 4 All exhibit in Portland, Maine. To see more of his work, visit cargocollective.com/tdstammart.
