David Datuna

USA Flag 2018

Merging the handcrafted and the technological, the historical and the contemporary, the personal and the universal, mixed-media artist David Datuna creates layered compositions through which he presents social, political, and cultural issues for consideration from multiple viewpoints. Optical lenses are key to his practice. He overlays them in web-like patterns onto images of national flags, global brands, and portraits of famous authors, inventors, and artists of all kinds, composed of collaged photographs, newspaper articles, magazine clippings, and painted passages. As Datuna describes, the lenses, which simultaneously distort and clarify the images, signify the network of individual viewpoints brought to bear on all issues. “The lenses symbolically express individual identity, illusion, perception, fragmentation, and unification,” he says. “The network of positive and negative lenses expresses the multiple points of view we all share from within.”