Rem Denizen

Born in 1980 in Detroit, Michigan

Lives and works in Portland, Oregon 

Rem Denizen is a thinker, artist, and maker born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. He is currently based in Portland, Oregon. Rem co-founded the Bruce High Quality Foundation, amongst other successful art based collectives, and is currently focused on the psychology of user/maker relationships in art processes through OSAP (Open Source Art Process) projects. His artworks deal both with political and personal themes, and he works, through a complex visual language, to tug at subtle trains of thought within viewers own minds that guide them towards developing their own meanings and relationships with the objects he creates.

Rem’s large-scale installations aim to transform spaces into individuated and communal places of gathering, where meaning can be produced both in the collective and personal sense. His Inkblot and 30-60-90 paintings appropriate pages from art books as their ground, images that are often immediately recognizable even from the corners of works as they peek through blotted ink drawings entangled with the webs of spiders or plants. Rem intends these pictures to “innocently elicit associations” in the minds of his audience, hopefully “bypassing the rational mind and inspiring active imagination” with subtle, subconscious evocation. His sculpture embraces surreality.

The results are insanely beautiful and complex works— Rem’s ideas and objectives bridge the personal and universal with equal parts mischief and eloquence.