Perception

Born and raised in New York City, Endewelt began to attend Manhattan’s School of Visual Arts in 1967 and quickly became part of the faculty. He retired to Las Vegas in 2000 after a long career that combined teaching with freelance commercial illustration. "We're conditioned to expect the things around us to behave, smell, taste a certain way, depending upon their appearance,” he said during a CAC group show in 2004. “I wanted to comment on the presumptive aspect of this expectation." Casey Weldon, who designed a catalogue for the memorial exhibition that was held in Trifecta Gallery after Endewelt’s death from lung cancer in 2006, described his work like this: “Everything is rendered so perfectly. But then there is the juxtaposition of the weird subject matter. The work, at first glance, seems so conservative, straightforward, but looking closer you see that it's off-kilter, eerie.” (Interview published in the Las Vegas Sun, July 21, 2006).