DAN DEVENING / PAUL ERSCHEN
WORDS ON A PAGE

FEBRUARY 28 - APRIL 11, 2025

EVENTS

ARTISTS’ RECEPTION
Friday, February 28, 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm 
Wege Gallery 

GALLERY TALKS WITH DAN DEVENING AND PAUL ERSCHEN
Saturday, March 1, 10:00 am - 11:30 am
Wege Gallery 

Join us for gallery talks in the exhibition WORDS ON A PAGE with Paul Erschen and Dan Devening. Registration is encouraged.

SATURDAY HOURS
Saturday, March 22, 10:00 am - 4:00 pm
Saturday, March 29, 10:00 am - 4:00 pm
Saturday, April 5, 10:00 am - 4:00 pm 

The Wege Gallery is proud to present Dan Devening and Paul Erschen: WORDS ON A PAGE. Featuring sculpture by Erschen and works on paper by Devening, the gallery becomes a site of correspondence between the two artists where their interests in various forms of visual communication, industrial and technological advances, and the analogue processes of making things by hand overlap. 

“The medium is the message,” coined by communications theorist and philosopher Marshall McLuhan claimed that the way we send and receive information is more important than the content of the message itself, or—the content matters less than the structures of the media. His theories circulating in the 60s were prescient then, as we consider our contemporary relationship to our phones and computers. McLuhan and other medium theorists apply these ideas to the dawn of written text, when Socrates complained of its disruption to the oral tradition, itself a medium that established societies and institutions. “The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark into the light of the mind. The hand that built the parchment page built a city.” --M.M.  

From this angle, WORDS ON A PAGE invites us to consider how we are shaped by the media that surrounds us, and how the quality of our communication and ideals have adapted to mirror the attributes of the most dominant forms of media. For Devening and Erschen, it’s a dilemma to resolve in the studio. Putting attention squarely on form, format, and the formal, they acknowledge the various traceable histories of the elements within their work, and their processes and materials—spray painted and sewn collage, clay, cast aluminum, plaster and concrete—take on a referential quality. In WORDS ON A PAGE, the two artists work within the broad confines of their media, somewhere in the zone between reverence and disruption.