Installation Art

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While working on my BFA and for my Graduating BFA Show exhibit, I had the opportunity to use a number of local spaces for installation art and site-specific painting work. These are typically non-permanent, and subsequently painted-over again, or removed, once finished. One of these venues was the McDonough Museum of Art, an indispensable gift to the Youngstown State University Art Program. Located right next to the art department, it is an ideal modern space that is dedicated to using much of its yearly show schedule to be occupied by student and faculty work. It was great to have such a beautiful resource on hand as a student. I always recall a piece that involved some of my son's artwork, titled Maybe They’re All Picking Flowers, that was done in the large gallery room and is now buried under layers of paint whenever I visit the McDonough. As a teenager now, my son has little recollection of this show. He didn't know it at the time, but in a way, he was having his first art exhibit at age 3 back in 2008! 

Maybe They’re All Picking Flowers (Artist statement from 2008)

The inherent beauty of simple, not over thought mark making is the inspiration of this work. My interest has long been held by the elevation of quotidian objects and the world inhabited by children. The muse for this piece comes from the drawings of my 3 year-old son, who recently started making stick figures of family members without direction or influence. He provided the scribbles that I have enlarged, as well as their titles. These pictures are relevant as an example of a person’s first representational sketches. In these translations, the images question the boundaries of fine art when scale and medium are modified such that the mundane is elevated. 

-David

(2020) - The Maybe They're All Picking Flowers piece had an overall title and then each individual "figure" or scribble was given a specific name by my son and marked with a clear label-maker sticker. The names were labeled exactly as he said them to me. The naming process, for me, conjures the Salvador Dalí paranoiac-critical method described as a "spontaneous method of irrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivity of the associations and interpretations of delirious phenomena." The titling is then reflective of the spontaneity of the drawing and mark-making that adults cannot make, free from the baggage and knowledge of how they suppose they should. Other than "blowing the figures up" on the wall space and adding upwards dripping paint no alterations to my son's designs/drawings were made.