David's Statement

Ok im gonna have two cause I'm David and i do what i want.

here is a shorter statement that i wrote 15min ago

statment of the artist. 

I won't pretend to know anything about what is in my images 

but i would really like to. 

In-fact it eats away at me 

because to continue as i have

might lean toward madness

but i won't pretend to know of madness either

I believe It is somewhere between faith and devotion that my actions find reason.

In what im not so sure i know

but i would really like too. 

I do know what it means to try. 

To continue to try. 

In a way ones manhood is falsely assumed by his accomplishments.

Not his efforts. 

I understand effort

Ive heard a man often does but a boy often tries.

Maybe i am disillusioned by the idea of my own success 

I fear its emptiness.

Its finitude 

I seem to prefer to walk away from things empty handed. 

But i have my picture. 

making gestures that allude to my efforts 

I try on many guises looking for the one that may make you smile

I oscilate between wanting you to love me and wanting the picture to love me. 

I’m not sure i know how to accomplish either 

but i would really like to

It is very much a belief in believing though. 

In The frame 

The light 

The camera

what is in front of it

and behind it

The object

the time 

the place

the event

I have my little picture now

this little pathetic record i have made

so trite

so terrible at what it wants to be. 

but boy does it try. In superb detail

Impotent but disarming. 

I flirt with the possiblity of utilizing this power 

because It makes me feel like i am in control of our intimacy.

Here is a draft of my jargony statement that i turn in when i want money from people. which is pretty sad cause its not that good either.

The Politics of Seeing: Artist Statement

I always start by photographing, specifically looking for moments where I can point to the spectacle of my everyday, using the apparatus of the camera to investigate the nature of seeing it. I then seek to politically problematize that way of seeing, through strategies influenced by the history of post-structuralist thought. I arrest that often exclusionary critical faculty to investigate my individual way of seeing as interdependent to a collective, depolarizing the roles of spectator and consumer within the construction of socio-cultural difference. The photographing then becomes a willing flirtation with the possibility of an alternative. It's a fitting allegory for my desire to transgress the burden of what W.E.B Dubois refers to as my 'double consciousness.' It is relief within an inherited repression. 'If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.' - Michel Foucault-. 

When I first took up photography it was the darkroom not the camera that seduced me. Now the distinctions and barriers between the two have collapsed, and I'm interested in the agency of the unique phenomenological space that is created between them. It is a gesture toward depolarizing the space between the question of truth and the subjectivity of desire. After the moment of capture, back In the studio, i start the practice of trying to respond to and complicate what I have done. This allows me to ontologically destabilize the works object-hood and assigned meaning, while taking responsibility for the instinctual elements that construct my narrative gaze. My desires, insecurities, inadequacies, and obsessions, they are all giving form to my pastiched visual language. Through simple shifts in installation, juxtaposition, and context, i provoke moments that point to the malleability of familiar signs and readymade structures, figuring them open and unstable. 

My way of seeing is nestled within the desperation to find my own specificity within a clear cut archetype; Wholly middle class, 2nd generation college educated, raised in predominately white suburban neighborhoods, and most importantly disillusioned with trying to figure out what those things mean to a black body twice removed from the civil rights movement. There is a dissociative blankness there. It feeds a kind of psychological fugue state where the relationship to ones own cultural memory feels familial but foreign, warranted but perverse. My linguistic instinct then slips into an omnidirectional palimpsest, utilizing various forms of intentional and situational code switching. Linguistic systems and their assigned narratives, academic, personal, and pop culture, are deconstructed and re-constructed creating new abstract mythologies from their residue. 

So there exists this ebb and flow; construction and deconstruction, naïveté and criticality, kitsch and camp, the world at large and the studio. I am at war with the irony of my inherited difference, evasively perpetuating and deconstructing its existence. It's a kind of comedy too trite and awkward to be tragic but playing along feeds a seedy kind of omnipresent self-reflection. My work lives in the pleasure of this kind of perpetual abstraction.