Dylan Chazin-Bowman at After Hours Gallery

Banner Image: Detail of Smile! by Dylan Chazin-Bowman. Courtesy of Carl Atiya Swanson.

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Philip Guston once said, “I've always had the feeling that art is nourished by the common and ordinary.” At After Hours Gallery in Saint Paul (@afterhours.gallery), Dylan Chazin-Bowman (@dcbdump) has a collection of paintings that echo that sentiment, as well as the painter who voiced it.

“GUEST” is a small show, just nine paintings in all, but the works feel very at home in After Hours’ basement gallery space. The gallery itself is down a flight of neon green stairs, underneath the skate shop that was launched in 2022. It has the rough kinetic feel of a DIY space – you’re literally going to a basement show – and Chazin-Bowman should feel at home there, shooting videos for After Hours and having had two solo shows there previously, “Oh Blair” in 2025 and “echo echo” in 2023. 

 

Top Image: Installation view of GUEST at After Hours Gallery. Bottom Image: I Love You, 2026, mixed media, by Dylan Chazin-Bowman. Courtesy of Carl Atiya Swanson.

 

The paintings in “GUEST” carry on some of key formal elements from Chazin-Bowman’s past works. The canvases are all accentuated and embellished with other fabric, layering t-shirts and denim to form the base painting surface. That gesture creates a sense of motion in the material, combining a utilitarian nonchalance and necessity with a reference to bodies and presence. With their wide color fields and layered paints, absence and erasure are themes in the works, even as their titles and content – I Love You, Smile!, My Mirror, religious iconography, and pop culture references – point to connection and identity.

The painting itself also lives in that tension. If you have ever walked past the side of a building that has had generations of graffiti rollered over and noticed the uneven but compelling blocks of color, Chazin-Bowman’s work has that feel of street-level Abstract Expressionism. My Mirror is mostly a wash of industrial whites and off-whites, with collaged materials underneath, like the wheat-pasted posters got painted over. All this is punctuated by a grotesque grinning caricature in hot pink linework, a joke that may be self-effacing, but is also jarringly lonely.

 

Image: Detail, My Mirror, 2026, mixed media, by Dylan Chazin-Bowman. Courtesy of Carl Atiya Swanson.

 

In Concussion, a field of black stars stream up against a pale yellow background and dripping blue washes, with a clipped photo of clouds collaged in the top center. The overall effect is that of a photonegative inversion of an animation cel where the rasacally rabbit has just landed on its head, appropriately enough for a skate shop, but as a painting it also recalls the bold layout and nature-gazing of a late Matisse collage, with a dream-like quality to it.

There are fine details in the paintings to go along with the broad layers and collage. In Mary, a ghostly face peers out from under a dark cloak that might reference the blessed virgin or her son. Smile! and Waiting both have insets of painted abstraction in reds, pinks, blacks, and whites, flourishes that would not look out of place in early Guston studies.

 

Image: (Left) Mary, 2026, mixed media. (Right) Smile!, 2026, mixed media. Courtesy of Carl Atiya Swanson.

 

The works also benefit from their surroundings in the gallery. The painting Guest, with its mostly white background, seems to come out of the wall, and also is situated next to a foot-high square of elevated concrete – a fixture of the basement, but something akin to an unexpectedly empty plinth in the context. Mary, with its white, black, and fine pink tones, is set next to a black metal support beam and standpipe with red handle. All ordinary and common, but part of landing a trick is making it look like you’re not trying too hard, and Chazin-Bowman pulls that off with these works.

While GUEST is on view until July, 3, there is a quick turnaround with shows, as photographer and cinematographer Kevin Horn (@kevin_horn) opens a 20 year retrospective of photography work at After Hours on July 11. This is a homecoming for Horn, who grew up in the Mac-Groveland neighborhood and cut his teeth shooting skate videos, before launching the independent skate publication Anomaly Mag (@anomaly_mag), and heading to Los Angeles for work. With the curatorial connections and scene that After Hours is cultivating, expect a party.◼︎ 

GUEST at After Hours Gallery is on view up through July 3rd. To see more work by Dylan Chazin-Bowman, find him on instagram at @dcbdump and on YouTube @Dylan Chazin-Bowman.

 

Image: Entrance to After Hours Gallery. Courtesy of Carl Atiya Swanson.