GEORGE BILLIS GALLERY / Joe Davidson

ARTIST STATEMENT:

y body of work consists of sculpture and large scale installations made up of cast everyday consumerist objects. The objects are produced in multiples with mundane materials such as scotch tape, paper pulp, and plaster. I try to achieve a level of mass production in the objects, though all have been handmade. Most of the work is monochromatic, driven largely by the inherent quality and symbolism of the material used. I have been working as if on an assembly line, churning out the same image, looking for eventual meaning. My repetitive and seemingly meaningless actions are explored symbolically as reflections of the passage of time, emotional isolation, and escapist fantasy. The compulsive or obsessive acts required to create the pieces necessitates the omission of other perhaps more traditionally meaningful or useful activities. The viewer is asked to contemplate this notion of what has been lost through the time consuming details of the piece.

There is a qualitative gap between the original and the cast object, however slight. There is a peculiarity, a lack of life, to a cast object that I find meaningful. There is also autonomy within the cast object, a sense that this is now an object unto itself, separate from the original. It becomes distinct as a new object in the world while referencing its source. It is with these objects that I consider the consuming repetitive acts of daily living. I do not attempt exact replicas of an original object; I create shadows of the original. The work I make responds to the sometimes overwhelming stream of daily chores and consumerist choices we experience in our domestic lives.

Whether the product is a still life created in Scotch tape or a bouquet composed of plaster flowers, I look to the fantastic as a goal in my work. The work is intensely representational in content but without clearly assigned meaning, thus creating a disquiet. In this way I think in a surrealist vein, looking to traditional figures like Eva Hesse and Piero Manzoni, and contemporary figures like Robert Gober and Matthew Barney. The juxtaposition of the seemingly simple streamline objects with this disquiet adds a powerful force to the work, again symbolic of the contrast between the emotional life which defines us as humans and the compulsions and minutia that compose our daily lives.