2005-01-11

ok, here's my statement for '05; and I'm sticking to it:

David Grainger
Statement

I want to critically push the objectives and conceptual grace of my practice. After 5 years of living in New York City developing a studio routine, I am focused on returning to school with a renewed sense of purpose. Studying at "xxx" School of Art will help give me an understanding of my options and a better grasp of the current art world dialogue, thus opening the avenue to say more with less.

I�m interested in combining romantic ideas of the artist and popular modes of entertainment with a meditative repetition. My work revolves around a number of activities including drawing, painting, video, sculpture, and writing. The impulse under which all of these activities align themselves is performance. I am interested in art that straddles the divide between educated art culture and popular tastes. For this reason, I use the figurative in my work. It is also the intention behind combining painting with video, traditional with contemporary art forms.

I generally follow performance artists for starting points. Teh Ching Hsieh for example, inspires me with his rigorousness, developing his ideas through execution. I like Marina Abramovic�s way of making the spiritual accessible for any who will pause to watch, combining drama with sensation and biography. Olaf Bruening is someone I�ve recently taken to; he develops his craft by making a spectacle of himself with clever, dreamy, often hilarious films. I admire a lot of different painters, but have a special affinity for the likes of Walton Ford�s watercolors, that create the beautiful out of humble materials. Matthew Richie, John Morris, and Chris Chiappas also influence my work.

My current work, �The Freedom Tower Caste System,� is a series of watercolors, sculpture, and video that depict a story from separate floors in a building. In this project, the compositions are first developed as paintings almost completely from imagination and memory. I then recreate each scene as a real life diorama, recorded on video. Props are made to reproduce the backdrop and mechanisms that appear in the painting. I also find clothing similar to what appears on the characters. This procedure produces the painting with a new set of parameters, not in the �timeless� realm of the studio, but in the actual real world. This translation of image to event is interesting to me. It is appropriate for translation of studio work to political comment.

What differentiates my art from storytelling is that it refers to silence and wonderment. The drama is shifted from the plot to the craft. Like a psychedelic awareness, it refers again and again to the moment as an individual thing. We want a moment to exist that is fresh and perfect and will give meaning to all else, but it is always eluding us. Standing in Heraclitus�s flowing river, we develop patterns from idiosyncratic choice, personality traits from repetition. In my work the attention to detail, patterning, and repetitive marks are all attempts to crystallize a moment. My projects have parameters in the choices that I stick to. This is like finding a stone that you admire, polishing it, and cutting it to give it a geometric appeal, a rational beauty.