Located in Los Angeles, CA
The sunflower and the bouquet is an idea that has been floating around in the artist's head for years. It starts with the notion of the still life, the most basic subject when approaching visual art. It's the attempt to look at that which is full of life, yet by acknowledging its existence, one understands that beauty is temporary and will fade. This series starts with the flower, the symbol of fleeing beauty. By taking this character and turning it into a cast object, the artist has turned it into an icon, further removed from reality by bleeding it of color. The sunflowers then become beautiful shadows their former selves, as dying coral becomes enticing when it bleaches. They are elegant reminders of their past, whilst also becoming new figures that reference archaic notes of classical beauty expressed monochromatic hues.
STATEMENT
In the end, gravity always wins. It is the blunt, immutable force that has a constant effect, keeping us on the ground and ultimately pulling us into it. Sculpture by its very nature is in conversation with this pull, at times enjoying and acknowledging it, and at times trying to hide and defy it.
My work recognizes the force of gravity, sometimes tacitly and sometimes overtly. It is a practice of mixing the delicate with the ordinary. I have been mining the contrasts of sculpture, relishing the materiality while also attempting to address the ephemeral. Because sculpture is so heavily rooted in the ground, one has to accept its materiality. Yet, some of the most effective work I have witnessed is that which attempts transcendence. It is that steady push and pull between mass and lightness, solidity and absence, form and void. Additionally, I am drawn towards familiar objects and associations that are embedded within them. Current work makes reference to visual anchors such as bodily forms, sagging, or bloating. 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.
Joe Davidson
Category
2010s Abstract ABS Sculptures
