GRIMM is pleased to announce West, a new solo presentation by Dave McDermott at our Keizersgracht space in Amsterdam. This exhibition marks the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Artist statement:
Throughout my practice in general, I continue to be
interested in the possibilities of the meta-allegorical in
painting. Allegory being the relationship of a single symbol
to a "thing symbolized", I have always been interested
in going beyond that and creating works where multiple
symbols/ordering systems exist in the work simultaneously, all working together to require a certain balancing act of interpretation and discovery on the part of the viewer. In other words, the paintings themselves do not present the simple key of one to one translation that allegory does.
In my work, the meaning of the paintings is derived by
the viewer holding all the various symbolic relationships
present in the work in their head, all at the same time.
I have emphasized this way of working in this show,
modeling the overall physical structure of the exhibition
on a sort of poetic interpretation of an alter-piece painting.
I have carried over this structure of multiple works making
up a whole, with one primary "central" panel (in this case
the gold diptych), and multiple auxiliary panels to flush
out the "story". Both emphasize the importance of beauty
and structure in the same way. The difference (beyond
religious vs. secular) is that while an altarpiece historically
was a didactic object of sorts, used to relate specific
religious stories to the masses and reveal meaning, my
work obfuscates rhetorical meaning in order to emphasize
feeling, or "a vibe" as we call it.
The works in this show orbit around the mythology
of going "West". I come from the West, and I think
its inherent qualities of openness, other-worldliness,
awkwardness, strangeness, perversion, hedonism, desire,
and indecipherability have always informed my work.
I credit being raised in the West with my mindset as an
artist, namely to avoid didactic and illustrative tendencies,
and instead to aim for a transmission of feeling... more
poetry than "point".
Having now lived in New York for the better part of two
decades, the West is simultaneously native and foreign
to me, which now allows me to relate to the desire to go
west, as well. The desire to head west has a long history
in western culture, and particularly in America, and this
history is often marked by a stark contradiction between
expectation and reality. "The West" is seen as paradise,
a garden of Eden, a place of rebirth, of new life and
expanded prospects. But this hopeful prospect often goes
sideways at some point along the way, and those seeking
fecundity often find death. Whether this death is physical
and final, or rather metaphorical, and thus a potential source of regeneration, is a never-ending question. In
each case, it is unclear whether the story is really about
end or origin, or if they are in fact the same thing. This
obfuscation between beginning and end is where the show
exists.
The works in this show take a variety of cultural
references that I relate to this contradictory myth of the
West as a starting point, and then reorder them with my
own language. The Garden of the Hesperides, Joyce's The
Dead, Tennyson's The Lotos-Eaters, the "not quite" idyllic
paintings by Puvis de Chavannes, Manet, etc., as well
as more recent, popular mythologies of the West, John
Lennon's Lost Weekend for example, his attempt to escape
himself by leaving his life behind and heading to L.A., and
of course the ubiquitous desires of every young person
who heads to L.A. to "make it', serve as armatures on
which to build new images and ideas. Ultimately "West"
means many things: it has an inherent ambiguity that
mirrors my own way of working, and it’s that combination
of openness, freedom, idyllic beauty, and unease that I’m
emphasising in these works.
–Dave McDermott. Brooklyn, March, 2020