Joshua Reiman

Time Washes Over Us is a film that considers mortality through marine life and poetic observational storytelling. The project locates and films some of the longest-living animal species in the oceans of the world. The concept of mortality is expressed through a voiceover of an extended poem that was constructed after each encounter with these animals. The inspiration for the film comes from reading Gilgamesh (the oldest story ever written) around the time of the birth of my son Ole. In this epic poem, mortality is in question and the elixir for immortality lies at the bottom of the ocean. At the same time, I read in Science Magazine about marine biologist Julius Neilson who has been researching the Greenland Shark and discovered through carbon dating an eye lens sample that these sharks can live for over 500 years.

The animals featured in the film are the Icelandic Clam (Arctica Islandica); the Red Sea Urchin (Mesocentrotus Franciscanus) in Vancouver Island, British Columbia; and the Greenland Shark (Somniosus microcephalus) in Baffin Island Canada. Through encountering these animals in their natural habitat, it helps to bring consciousness to the fragility of life, while quietly interlacing theory, philosophy, and historical context, with questions about mortality and the human condition.

The film takes cues from the sensory ethnography film movement based at Harvard University, by using the visual and spatial combinations of aesthetics and ethnography to explore the ontology of the world we live and dream in. With mortality, it is important to identify and contemplate, especially when the human impact on nature is changing the earth on a daily basis, and at a very fast rate. Time Washes Over Us is an immersive cinematic essay that is transdisciplinary and is meant to instigate questions about our place within the natural world.

Time Washes Over Us, 2016 - 2022 - 21:19 min.

With Underwater Cinematography by: Joshua Reiman, Nick Caloyianis Productions INC, Marcelo Ogata, and Peter Mieras.

Music by: Patrick Carey, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Norihito Suda, and ANOHNI.

Voiceover by: Ole B Fossdalur Reiman

The film premiered at the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine on February 18th, 2022.

It was part of The North Atlantic Triennial, Down North

February 18 - June 5, 2022, Portland Museum of Art, Maine USA

October 13, 2022 - February 5, 2023, Reykjavik Art Museum, Iceland

May 26, 2023 - January 14, 2024 Bildmuseet, Sweden

Images below are of the edition which is 2 copies. Cast bronze Gilgamesh fragment tablet ‘spiny creature & the secret of youth’ quote (molded from British Museum collection), Greenland Shark skin fragment, Urchin spine, Clamshell, Seal skin rope, and a thumb drive containing a copy of the film.

ANALOG, DIGITAL, SOCIAL VISIONS OF SPACE

Hardcover, 560 pages

Editors: Alfred Weidinger, Fabian Müller-Nittel and Markus Reindl / OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH

The metaverse as a virtual parallel world and next manifestation of the internet has prompted wide-ranging debates ever since the blockchain hype got started. Yet the ability to build and shape worlds through the manipulation of social, real, and imaginary spaces has arguably been a key aspect of artistic and scientific creativity throughout the eras. Accompanying the exhibition at the Francisco Carolinum in Linz, the scientific anthology Meta.space—Visions of Space from the Middle Ages to the Digital Age is the first publication to examine this multifaceted history from an art-historical perspective. Gathering seventy-five positions in analog as well as digital and inter-media art, it offers a foundational contribution to the current debates over the metaverse. The palette of subjects ranges from studies of early painterly solutions to problems of pictorial space emerging in the fifteenth century and the question of how works of sculpture engender spaces to the sensory, scholarly, and technological practices of charting spaces and a critical engagement with the dystopian as well as utopian potentials of today’s cutting-edge conceptions of metaspaces.

Contributions by international writers representing a variety of scholarly disciplines focus on many aspects of analog and digital spatialities in the contexts of art and its sociology. Authors: Katrin Klietsch, Roswitha Schuller, Charlotte Reuss, Corinna Canali & Giulia Faccin, Ivana Lemcool, Stefan Buerger, Maria Buerger & Friedrich Schadow, Apurva Talpade, Joshua Reiman, Steven Scott, Jurit Kaertner, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, Claudia Fuggetti, Valentina Bartalesi & Anna Calise, Diana Thun, Edoardo Biscossi & Cosimo Campani, Giuseppe Resta & Fabiana Dicuonzo, Natalia Stanusch, Fabricio Lamoncha, Justyna Profaska, Sara Radi Ahmed & Carmen Armenteros Puchades, Juliusz Grabianski, Victor G. García Castañeda, César Escudero Andaluz, Benjamin K. Hodges, John Dimopoulos, Sara Rutz, Anika Schroter, Yorgos (George) Tzitsas, Laura Cocciolillo, Ben Livne Weitzman, Martin Zeilinger, Charu Maithani, Vincenzo Fiore Marrese, Manuela Naveau, Anna Komitska, Chad Dawkins, Mónica Jacobo, and Diana Lengua & Margo Lengua.

If you would like a copy, please order one HERE from Distanz

Each work in the series called Extreme Vanity is about the ego and our relationship to social media. Glass is used as a metaphor for fragility in how humans perceive themselves. 

Strange Devices is a book that contains two essay's, fifteen interviews with artists, and three reviews of exhibitions that express sculpture as neospatial practice.

Why hasn't the definition of Sculpture changed? Almost forty years after Rosalind Krauss wrote Sculpture in the Expanded Field, physical works of art continue to splinter and move further from their entrenched institutionalized categorization. In the last twenty years alone, our understanding of what sculpture is has dramatically shifted. But have the discussions surrounding sculpture evolved in tandem? Sculpture is hardly a singular term for an artwork, especially an artwork that inhabits space or is the space itself. Strange Devices frames contemporary sculpture as neospatial production.

Essay's included: Strange Devices and Unintentional Vices.

Interview's included: Janine Antoni, Rina Banerjee, Matthew Barney, Lowry Burgess, Lenka Clayton, Lewis Colburn, Young Joon Kwak, Athena Lynch, Katie Paterson, Charles Ray, Jon Rubin, Arcangelo Sassolino, Shoplifter, Simon Starling, and Julianne Swartz.

Reviews Included: Matthew Barney's Redoubt, Hito Steyerl's Drill, and Being Present in the Space of Video - Before Projection: Video Sculpture 1974-1995

Soft Cover Book. ISBN: 978-0-578-87180-6

1st edition - 250 copies.

Book design and Illustrations by Julian Montague - Montague Projects, Buffalo, NY

Dust jacket printed by hand at Pickwick Independent Press - Portland, ME

Book printing, Penmor - Lewiston, ME

Dirty Dishes, 2020

From the origins of existence, when the first humanoid picked up a rock, bone, or stick and hit someone else - human kind has - warred, fought, killed, raped, stolen, traumatized, and colonized.

Despite the presence of love, education, beauty, kindness, art, compassion, and the innocence of children, each part of the earth’s inhabitants have endured systemic abuses leading to very difficult histories that need to be dealt with.

You can see it in the streets and on the news. The dirty dishes of our past will never be cleaned away. Change comes from rising up and taking responsibility, to pay tribute to the indigenous people whose land we are on, enable reparations for slavery, and make sure that basic human rights such as food, shelter, and health care are met for all.

Food is political. The dishes that we eat on can survive longer than generations of human life. The dishes in this work represent thousands of years of oppression - including the Trump Mara Lago crystal glass. Even Joy has been discontinued, it is vintage and out of date. The lemon fresh scent can’t clean away generations of trauma, however the possibility of cleansing is always present.

*all images by Joel Tsui

The Wind Dies The Sun Sets, 2016 – 15:47 minutes - by Joshua Reiman and Eric Weeks

The Wind Dies The Sun Setsis a contemplative consideration of energy extraction and use in Pennsylvania (USA). The film follows three characters that are embedded within the business of fossil fuel. The Pennsylvania region has a long history of energy production, first associated with the industrial revolution, and presently with fracking. The film's emotional cadence shares the difficult realities of the altered landscape and the people who are involved.

Frick and Frack, 2015

Cast iron, acrylic, coke (coal), steel, water, pump, nylon. 24”x52”x90”

photos by Tom Little

a fountain within a vitrine in the shape of a keystone (Pennsylvania) using the bust of the robber baron Henry Clay Frick, and the plight of energy exploration for natural resources within the process of hydro fracking for natural gas. Frick’s mouth ooze’s fracking fluid that rots and rusts his face off.

Panoramique de l'immatériel, 2015 - 23 minutes

Panoramique de l'immatérielfollows a man who is panning for gold along the Seine River in France, from Paris to the sea. He is looking to find the gold that the artist Yves Klein dumped into the Seine in Paris during on of the most seminal conceptual artworks in contemporary art history, Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility. This film explores conceptual art, geology, and the riparian zone, where the river meets the land along The Seine all on equal terms by changing scales and relationships between art and landscape.

Single Channel HD Super 16mm video, in French with English subtitles.

This project was generously supported in part by funding from the Carnegie Mellon University Frank-Ratchye Fund For Art @ the Frontier.

Sand from the Western Kotel Wall in Jerusalem, Gold Plated Bronze, Nabulsi Cheese, Steel, Wood, And Acrylic.

photos by Tom Little

excerpt from conversation with artist Lewis Colburn for show at Napoleon Philadelphia

With Cheese and Crackers, I was going to have everything cast in bronze. Then I realized, through talking with my wife Addy, that the Israel- Palestine conflict is a very real problem, and to have the real Palestinian cheese in the work, and to have the cast matzo plated in gold suggests that the country of Israel is precious facade, that made a lot of sense to me. If it was cast bronze cheese, then everything would be in the same relational value, and it’s not, because everything has different values, from the political to the actual land that’s in question by each side.

At the same time, I was really struck by Dawn Weleski and Jon Rubin’s Palestinian version of their project Conflict Kitchen. They were addressing this very complicated subject through food. The project attracted death threats, hate mail, and social fallout, and when I stopped to think about it, really affected me. I was reading the New York Times every day, and hearing what has been going on in Palestine and Israel for so long, I wanted to say something about it. I thought that these two things could really go well together, these two countries, these two ideas, and that’s how I came to Cheese and Crackers, because cheese and crackers go together well. It seems like a lighthearted combination, but to have this real piece of Nabulsi (Palestinian) cheese rotting on this gold plated matzo on earth from Jerusalem is kind of fucked up. It allows us to see a conflict in a different way and discuss it again. It begs usthe sand comes from Jerusalem, from the Western Wall. This strip of land is often referred to as the “holy land”, and to have this plated surface to this cast bronze matzo is very important to my point. There are all these real materials- plated like fine cuisine, but Nabulsi (Palestinian) cheese is left to rot on this golden cracker sitting on earth from where this struggle really takes place.

Vulgar Display of Power, 2011 - Installation View, SU Art Gallery, Syracuse, NY

This installation consists of the legendary heavy metal guitarist, Dimebag Darrell's equipment cast out of heavy metals. He was murdered on stage at a concert in 2004.The stage that they sat upon has collapsed, and his signature Dean ML guitar, has been cast in iron, and now lies broken on the floor. The full stack Randall amplifier (cast in iron), and effects and chords (cast in lead), are twisted and strewn throughout the wreckage, and his lone guitar pick (cast in gold) lies on the floor. The sight of this destructive array gives way to the humming sound of the amplifiers that are now void of human interaction.

Beuys N the Hood, 2012 - 6’x 16’x 5’ - Felt, steel, cast copper rabbit, copper platted 100 spoke lowrider rims, white wall tires, copper platted mirrors.

The linked name of Joseph Beuys and the John Singleton movie, the car acts as a warm time machine, a transistor of movement and energy both in the movie and in art.

The Cogito Incognito, 2020

Cogito, ergo sum is a philosophical statement that was made in Latin by René Descartes, usually translated into English as "I think, therefore I am". The phrase originally appeared in French as je pense, donc je suis in his Discourse on the Method.

But what I really want to know is - Who put Descartes before the horse?

• all images by Joel Tsui

Exquisite Corpse

Wall drawing exhibition at SPACE Gallery, Portland, ME

June 4 – August 12, 2017

photos by Joel Tsui

Curators:

Ethan Murrow & Elizabeth Spavento

Artists:

Carly Glovinski, Ethan Murrow, Addy Smith-Reiman, Josh Reiman, Aaron Stephan, Jamal Thorne, and AnthonyYoung

The Project:

Exquisite Corpse puts artists in situations of surprise, celebrating chance, coincidence and odd pairings. Our project will follow this model and will ask each artist to come with some ideas, materials and potential plans while being prepared to encounter the unexpected, embrace the challenges of collaborating with others and a dynamic exhibition space and build a piece that is only partly aware of its full role in a final product.

reiman|smith-reiman

response – in 2 parts - to ‘the apartment’ exquisite corpse 7.15.2017

part 1

Our play with the exquisite corpse began with the intangible, based on discussions of the theme ‘the apartment’ with the other artists regarding housing, home, safety, equity, family, structure, grounding, etc. Our first challenge was how to materialize the emotional, economic and/or political response of such a loaded topic in the physical form.

As new residents of Portland we are keenly aware of the present tensions around housing: affordability, transience, tourism, homelessness, and change. We took this opportunity to learn more: what is the ebb and flow of Portland’s economy, what are its building boom and bust periods, and housing gluts and crises. Pouring through the archives at the Maine Historical Society, The Portland Public Library and Greater Portland Landmarks, we came across this statement:

Congress Street is Portland’s “Main Street.” The richness and diversity of its architecture and public spaces…constitutes a unique record of Portland’s residential and commercial development history.

Along Congress Street in the Arts District some of the largest structures were built as luxury hotels for a burgeoning tourist population at the turn of last century. Post WWII the city’s tourism base declined and these hotels were converted in to efficiency and subsidized apartment buildings. The Lafayette, Congress Square, and the Columbia hotels inspired us to look at adaptation and repurposing that would literally ground us to Congress Street.

part 2

The tangible was partially imagined weeks before we entered the gallery, allowing us more time to construct physical elements we would use (or not) to respond both to our concept and the small sliver of a physical clue left behind. We had already decided to use the spatial drawing techniques of design professionals: a figure ground, an exploded axon and a plan – with the use of building materials to depict permanence and temporality.

It was a surprise and challenge to have vague and unexpected materials left by Ethan as our prompt: two spools of thread (red and blue) – and a small thread-wrapped ladder composed of nails. How this would link to our work – per the game - kept us in a quandary for the majority of the week. We were already wedded to our representation of varying scales of a singular building that experienced change over a century due to social and economic pressures – and we made numerous attempts to weave in Ethan’s thread to our work – at great failure. It was at the suggestion of Ian Colwell, the Space intern, to use nails to outline our building, the Lafayette, that successfully completed our piece of the puzzle.

Inspired by the ambiguity of Ethan’s prompt, we left little to no indication of our manufactured narrative except 8” of undulant openness and density in the more traditional drawing material of graphite, leaving the opportunities for Anthony as open as possible.

Let Me Tell You a Story, 2020

Cast Bronze, Cast Iron, Horse Hair, Blown Aluminum, Sinew, Wax

A bell that makes a quiet sound. It is a sculpture that is rooted in human consciousness itself. The bell is a form that is used to spark oral knowledge, folklore, myth, and spirituality - both natural and terrestrial in vastness. It is a traditional instrument that expresses the cosmos of sound.

for CSAPGH JOSHUA REIMAN and ADDY SMITH-REIMAN designed an invasive plant kit modeled on traditional plant kits for home gardening. The kit includes a hand-forged trowel with wooden handle, 5 seeds for invasive species, and a small booklet with information on the history of each species and their impact on the environment. Each shareholder has the power to open and plant the seeds, or can preserve the piece and their native landscape by keeping the box closed!

photos by Tom Little

Rock and Roll, 2015

Carrara Marble, poppy seeds, my mom's copy of Billy Joel's Glass Houses - Vinyl 12” record, steel, wood, acrylic.

14”x14”x 72”

photos by Tom Little

Vanished Into Plein Air, 2015 - 9 minutes

Vanished Into Plein Air offers up a romantic view of a marinescape painter who ventures outside to make a painting by the ocean, and realizes the nature is just not good enough without people to inhabit his canvases. Shot in Prout's Neck Maine and inspired by Winslow Homer's last painting Driftwood, the film offers us a glimpse into an artistic process, where ones emotions meet pigment and oil beside the ocean and rocky shore.

3-Channel Super 8 to HD video & HD Super 16mm video, voiceover by Lowry Burgess.

The Bones, 2015

Cast Iron, Cast Bronze, Cherry wood, aluminum foam, steel, acrylic. 16”x24”x72”

photos by Tom Little

http://rosarts.org/past-events/casting-the-iron-garden/

In 2014, Rivers of Steel partnered with the Penn State Master Gardener Program of Allegheny County to develop a comprehensive plant survey of the lands in and around the Carrie Furnaces in Rankin, PA. The Master Gardeners set out to learn more about the succession of native, aggressive, and/or invasive plant species that are surviving, and even thriving, in these disturbed soils.

Project concept, design, and execution by Addy Smith-Reiman.

Cast Iron plaque molding, casting, fabrication, and installation by project managers were Ed Parrish Jr and Joshua Reiman alongside Penn State Master Gardeners of Allegheny County, Carnegie Mellon School of Fine Art students, Casey Westbrook of Carbon Arts, and everyone at RoSA.

This collaborative project created ten cast-iron interpretive plaques placed along a portion of the Carrie Furnaces newly deemed the Iron Garden Walk. The plaques guide visitors through the surrounding fields and structures, providing a narrative of the wild gardens that share the former industrial landscape of the Carrie Furnaces. These plaques are designed to allow visitors to take rubbings and include botanical illustrations of the local plant community, highlighting features such as bark, fruit, and leaf form for easy identification. The images are paired with narratives on plant succession inclusive of soil conditions, environmental factors, and the potential for future plant communities.

Iron Garden tours of the site are led by Rivers of Steel and Master Gardener guides upon request.

Funding for the event and the plaques was generously provided through Rivers of Steel, The National Park Service, and The Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Funding for the installation has been secured with a Seed Grant from The Sprout Fund, and a grant from Awesome Pittsburgh.

Carrara marble, steel, fake rubber hand, motor, silk fabric - everything fits in a 16”x16”x16” box. Made for traveling exhibition - Two Kinds of Funny

A Brief Inquiry, 2010 - 12 minutes

A Brief Inquiry is a film about the sublime and its use in our everyday vernacular. Since the world has already been discovered, an explorer goes off to find the only thing that is left, an emotion called “the sublime”. The film’s voiceover is rich in theory and hysterical commentary describing the overuse and misunderstanding of the word "sublime" while visually driven by an ongoing quest for an overwhelming natural experience.

4-Channel Super 8 film to HD video, with voiceover.

Proposal for the 2014 International Garden Festival at Reford Gardens in Grand Metis Quebec.

Inebriate botanicorum is a living museum – a planted visualization of alcohol and its origins.

We have taken plant matter out of its traditional environment and presented specimens in a monolithic structure with a bar at one end. The structure is reminiscent of both a liquor store with shelves and a vitrine in a natural history museum. It is both whimsical and scientific, a cabinet of curiosities, that we hope will educate and inspire.

A Collection of Modern Objects - 3’ x 3’ x 8’- chrome plated steel

Sports trophies are modern sculptures, and modern sculpture, are trophies.

photos by Tom Little

Bias Cut, 2013

Paper (a few hundred centerfolds from 1980’s and early 90’s Hair Metal magazines) &hot pink mesh fabric 74”x88”

The idea is roughly based on influences in my teenage years. After making the work, I realized it is about identity, hypersexuality, gender politics and sleaze. It is a quilt gone wrong, a blanket of unknown sexuality, made of fragments of memory of a time long gone with bands we will never remember.

The End of Art is Art (for Baldesarri), 2010 - Syracuse Post Standard Newspaper April 19, 2010.

I cremated a book about the death of art by Donald Kuspit. I made art from it.

The People, 2009 – 11 minutes

The People is inspired by Native American stereotypes and racist depiction embodied in some contemporary sports mascots. The film portrays a man who has a bad daydream and ends up in an alternate space where he is tormented by pressures of negative symbolism, only to eventually be awakened by a coyote.

Single Channel Super 8 film to SD video, soundtrack by Keril Makan.

26 second video of David Lee Roth in the Rothko Chapel. Shown imbedded in a wall on a 4” monitor. This video is meant to be seen individually in a shrine like manner.

7" of Old Cape Cod the famous Patti Page song. The project is about imagined places and how nostalgia operates as fantasy. This is a limited edition of 100. 

7” vinyl record (edition of 100), 1950 RCA Victor record player, table; 3’ x 16” x 20”

Die Andere Seite der Welt (the otherside of the world) – w/ Lewis Colburn

2009 performance and installation at Skulpturen Park in Berlin, Germany

suitcases, flag pole, folio of photographs, cases, paperwork, flag, jumpsuits, suits, crate; 3’ x 7’ x 3’, 2009

This was a proposal was made in collaboration with my wife Addy Smith-Reiman for the International Garden Festival at the Jardins de Métis, Grand-Métis , in Québec, Canada. The theme for 2009 was ‘secret garden’. We would still very much like to produce this piece for the right site and context.

The tension between nature and space is most evident in urban conditions of the 21st century where competition for the cultivation of the garden is limited to rooftops and small parcels.

Our design takes the traditional icon of the tree and reimagines the structure as a vertical platform that provides planting opportunities for small gardens at multiple layers. This tree can be placed anywhere, bringing the garden to areas that may otherwise be constrained.

Team:

Addy's research and designs ruminate on the history and preservation of site-specic space. Joshua's research is in the making of contemporary art and the theories and concepts surrounding it.

Together their project will address the site, space, and our shared history of garden design through the fabrication of a secret space with conceptual resonance.

4- 30”x40” color c-prints

12”x16” color c-print

Creation|Creation – steel, cast aluminum, found objects, endless tape recorder, motor, gears, wood; 7’ x 8’ x 18”, 2009

AudioBiography of a Face, 2008 - 6’x 2’x 2’, 8 b&w 5”x6” monitors, DVD players, wire, steel.

8-channel video sculpture. We never really see our whole face in the bathroom. I videotaped myself attending to my needs in the bathroom, by taping each part of my face that I was looking at while working on it. Then I assembled the video head to see what I look like, yet the face that is seen is not like my own.

Cast Aluminum & paint

2000 bales of hay, tomb with cast bronze and silver sculptural artifacts. 32’ x 32’ x 32’

As History Happens is based on how we understand history through artifacts. Artifacts are found and then experts theorize about them. What we believe as fact can very easily be one person's interpretation or theory. With this in mind, I have created a culture that never existed and performed a burial of artifacts from the culture. This organic monument has since decomposed into a large mound deep in the forest that someday, someone may dig up and discover these artifacts.

Documentary about project -Inventing History

by Kristen Smoragiewicz with Music by Greg Davis.

Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5mAxXD9FWw

Full Doc https://www.vermontcam.org/show/inventing-history

Michael Jackson Pollock, 2007 27”x33” c-prints from a series of 5 images

Michael Jackson Pollock gestures to this self-destructive instability through the marriage of two of America’s most famous artists—the painter Jackson Pollock and the pop superstar Michael Jackson. Originating from the semantic hinge of a shared name, this series of performance photographs constitutes a quasi-historical fantasy by drawing on the familiar and the unreal, the comic and the tragic, the planned and the accidental. Into the recreated barn studio of Pollock, Reiman inserts a hybrid character—an amalgamation of the painter and the pop star—who reenacts the painter’s signature technique of dripping loose paint onto a canvas laid flat on the studio floor while sporting a thick, jheri curl mane and an iconic glitter glove. Reiman integrates these cultural idols through a play of signs, and he uses the strategy of reenactment to compel a comparison of the artists and interrogate the mediation of collective memory.

- from essay by Ruth Erickson

G. Washington, 2001 - 30"x30" c-prints from a series of 14 images.

G. Washington implores viewers to consider how notions of heroism, celebrity, and rebellion have shaped the popular culture of two distinct epochs in American history: the period of the Revolutionary War and the Hip-Hop era. This recent series of photographs by Joshua Reiman draws upon the stylistic cues of contemporary Bling-Bling – a visually overt system of status display – while also placing this culture in dialogue with popular representations of this nation’s forefathers. Viewers are confronted by provocative images of George Washington and his compatriots wearing powdered wigs, grills (gold teeth), diamond-encrusted pendants, and customized basketball uniforms – individuals who strut around with a sense of swagger and confidence more befitting gangster rappers of the late 1990s than revolutionary leaders.

Taken from a 2008 essay by Stefan Osdene.

30”x40” c-print

This is a portrait of a modern day master. His sex appeal and musical genius, mixed with the rockin and viciously talented Van Halen, changed the rock world forever, and they are still kickin ass. This portrait is the embodiment of Diamond Dave.

Blackbeard 1718, 2000-2006 - 40"x40" c-print from a series of 7 images.

From a series of photographs referencing the emotional psyche of the pirate Blackbeard. The approach is through a grouping of very large-scale portraits. This is to place and confront the viewer within the feelings of the person, rather than the stereotypical ideal of being a pirate.

Bird, 1999 - 20"x24" c-print.

I made a minimal bird mask and outfit, and sat in a tree all day in Brooklyn.

20”x20” 4 flex prints in edition of 3

Jackass, 1998 - 40"x60" c-print from a series of 7 images.

People in NYC are on the move, rarely looking at each other, caught up in their own world. Jackass is about bringing a different happening to the ordinary day. To see if people notice, or simply block it out. I created 5 large fiberglass masks of Jackass, and had 5 guys wear them around New York City, sometimes posing as tourists in well know locations.

20”x20” flex prints in edition of 3

Kinetic Sculpture - found objects, cats bronze, timers, motors, water, pump, satellite actuator, steel

Mobile Home Portrait (front & back) – mixed media, motors, bronze; 6’ x 3’ x 1.5’, 1997

Fan, Hour Counter, Plastic Bull, Atsroturf, Wood

toy gun, adult cowboy hat, mini cowboy hats, disco ball, wood, light

Space Baby, 1996 Kinetic Sculpture

4'x3' Motor, Steel, Paint, Cast Iron, Mirror, Wood, Light

Super 8 loop projector playing fast moving clouds over Seattle Washington from Cast Iron face.

Steel, airplane cable, cast iron, super 8 film, super 8 loop projector, wire

Cottonwood 32” waist

Kinetic Sculpture 1995 - Found object, steel, tape recorder, motors, stickers, M80 fireworks (live)

Video of two people kissing on 4” monitor, pigeon wings, motor, wood box, fishing line, airplane cable

Kinetic sculpture - dimensions variable

The whole sculpture represents a relationship between a man and a woman. the figures spin around and stop and hold hands at random. The from moves and it also plays music and fighting sounds.

Steel, motors, wood, fabric, luggage, bricks, cast aluminum, tire, belting, bumper stickers, endless cassette tape playing ‘Good Times’ by Le Chic and Kung Fu sounds by Bruce Lee from Enter the Dragon, cassette player, chain, ball hitch

Kinetic sculpture - 3’x2’x8’

Plywood, cast aluminum, cigarettes, alcohol, Christmas lights, motor, belting, bearings, steel, rifle on stand.

Kinetic sculpture - 3’x2’x15’

Ficus Tree in painted pot, cast iron, bale of shredded us currency, SPAM, neon, cow sound toys, motor, astroturf, steel, wood. cast aluminum, wire

Kinetic sculpture - 3’x2’x6’

Steel, motor, cast bronze, cast aluminum, wood beam, cast glass fists, epoxy, paint

David Koresh was born on August 17, 1959, in Houston, Texas. In 1990, he became the leader of the Branch Davidians. He and his followers built an "Army of God" by stockpiling weapons in preparation for the Apocalypse. On February 28, 1993, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms raided the Davidians' compound outside of Waco, Texas, resulting in a 51-day siege that drew national attention. The standoff ended when the compound erupted in flames on April 19; Koresh, who shot himself, was among the dozens found dead.

from biography.com

Chainsaw carvings hung in a tree - dimensions variable.

Cottonwood root balls, Maple, steel, rope

Cottonwood, cedar, maple and steel. 2’x4’x14’

I took a variety of wood species and morticed them together and carved this sculpture that stood in steel pipes sunk into the ground. The steel heart was very thin. I took 1” plate steel, cut a small heart shape and then hammered it on the forge until it was drawn out and paper thin.

Cottonwood, Maple, lead, steel I beams, copper sheet, copper nails.

4’x8’x10’

largest wood carving I had done as a teenage sculptor :)

inflatable made with Julia Montroy

Cottonwood and steel

Somaticidal Tendencies, down the Eightfold Path (without concentration), 2023

Bronze, books, plaster, and plexiglass.

The Eightfold Path is a holistic and interconnected set of practices taught by the Buddha as a way to liberate oneself from suffering and achieve enlightenment.

Right understanding (Samma ditthi)

Right thought (Samma sankappa)

Right speech (Samma vaca)

Right action (Samma kammanta)

Right livelihood (Samma ajiva)

Right effort (Samma vayama)

Right mindfulness (Samma sati)

Right concentration (Samma samadhi)

I wonder what happens if you can not concentrate? As someone who tries all the time, mediation and zen practice seem to fall just short for me. Reading Siddhartha by Herman Hesse is an essential read for everyone.