Opening Reception
Saturday, August 1, 2026
5:00 - 7:00pm

Dreamliners assembles objects and images from the mid-twentieth century moment when progress felt most like destiny: Pan Am flying boats, LIFE magazines, lifejackets, sunblock, straw hats, shipping containers, endless horizons. Together they form an archive of optimism, sleek engineering, and the promise that the world was suddenly, thrillingly within reach.

Duke's practice has long lived in the space between painting an object and treating the painting itself as an object, an artifact with its own weight, materiality, and history. These are things Duke has handled, inherited, or lived alongside, and rendering them in paint becomes a way of asking what survives translation. What does a lifejacket remember? What does a magazine cover forget? What does a shipping container carry that was never listed on its manifest?

The objects are not innocent, and the work that holds them is absent of nostalgia. The flying boat that compressed distance also compressed culture. The sunblock and lifejacket, meant to protect the body, point to how fragile that body remains inside the machinery meant to carry it forward. The shipping container, born from the same mid-century faith in engineered efficiency, made the movement of goods so seamless that it also made the costs of that movement easy to ignore. Mass media sold a vision of the modern world while quietly setting its terms. Progress, by its nature, disrupts. There has never been a version of it that did not.

Duke thinks of this as history's rhyme structure, the way innovations resurface across decades not as exact repeats but as variations that carry forward both their promise and their cost. Mark Twain's observation that history does not repeat but often rhymes feels true down to the object level: a sail and an airplane wing solve the same problem, generations apart, and a shipping container does for global trade what the flying boat once did for global travel. Both are progress traps dressed as solutions, efficient enough to outrun the questions they raise. 

The title borrows from Boeing's Dreamliner, an aircraft whose name still trades on the same aspirational language the Pan Am era perfected.

Painting these forms slowly, by hand, with clean, deliberate precision, is its own argument against the messiness of the progress it depicts. That precision is not a denial of the mess, it is a way of looking at it closely enough to see what got smoothed over. It is a way of holding still inside a subject that never did.

Image: Flying Boat 1 Oil on canvas 40" x 64"