Merry Karnowsky Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition by renowned British artist, photographer, filmmaker and writer Dave McKean. PERSISTENCE OF VISION is a glimpse inside McKean’s mind. His paintings and drawings capture the mystery of silent film and serve as postcards from his travels around the world. In a series of skeleton drawings, a man becomes pathologically aware of his own skeleton and the feeling of his bones grinding and sliding against each other inside his skin. McKean’s striking photographs depict an ironic, sub-atomic tarot deck for an unseen world, combining traditional tarot iconography with tables of quarks and fermions of particle physics.

Born in Berkshire, England in 1963, McKean attended Berkshire College of Art and Design. During his college years he began working with author Neil Gaiman. Their collaborations include numerous graphic novels and children’s books. McKean created the cover illustrations for the popular Sandman series of graphic novels, and a collection of this work, Dust Covers, was published in 1998. McKean wrote and illustrated the award-winning comic novel Cages, which will be re-released in 2009 by Dark Horse along with his short story collection Pictures That Tick. He has contributed illustrations to The New Yorker, Playboy, and other magazines, and has created promotional work for films including Blade, Alien Resurrection and Sleepy Hollow. McKean was also a conceptual artist for Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. He has designed the packaging for more than 150 albums, for artists including Tori Amos, The Misfits, Alice Cooper and Counting Crows. He has done graphic design and photography for Sony Playstation, Kodak, British Telecom and Nike, among others. He has also directed two feature films, MirrorMask (2005) which premiered at Sundance Film Festival and Luna, currently in post production. The artist lives on the Isle of Oxney in Kent, England with his wife and their two children.