Scape=land is an unconventional perspective on the medium of abstract painting and environmental art. Extending the limits of 'plein air' painting and canvas, found objects in nature are collected to create site-intrusive painting constructions....Playing with the materiality of canvas, the flat 2D surface is dissolved, allowing the hybrid constructions to reveal a degenerative naturalism.
Kenosha Pass, Colorado
Outdoor site-intrusive painting constructions: burnt pine branches, animal feces, aluminum foil, acrylic, ink drops, neon tape, plastic nibs on and/or cut through canvas and canvas board.
2011
As a nomadic model, Hunter (d'hiver), establishes the act of painting as one illusive, spacial expansion of environmental artmaking. Each painting is installled and deinstalled within minutes at a specific, random site located in an isolated partial of wilderness unseen by any public.
The work is a temporary thing; a movement; a series of meanings devoid of an absoltue object embedded in space.
The canvas, combined with nature's fleeting detritas, is photographed as a site-intrusive 'painting construction' that challenges and reinterprets the aesthetic and phenomenological foundations of painting. Each image is part of an intinerary, a fragmentary sequence of events and actions through discursive sites whose narrative is defined by the artist and his collaborators: the Atlanta Poets Group....all sharing the identity of narrator-antagonist.
Indian Peaks Wilderness, Colorado
Outdoor site-intrusive painting constructions: snow, ice, pine branches, acrylic, ink drops, neon tape, plastic nibs on and/or cut through canvas and canvas board.
Acrylic, alkyd, oil pastel and pencil on canvas.
2009-2012
As rigorous reconsiderations of landscape, these works exist across a continuum of traditional beauty eclisped by a post-apocalyptic vision. The landscape becomes a vehicle for de-constructive activity symbolic of human programs of degradation and renewal.
The revealed, incised rawness of the 'Whiteout' paintings is disconnected and unrefined -- a toxic commingling of natural and human forces. We are left with silent places of vacancy, poison and refuge where Original Color and Original Perspective are wiped out -- like white outs created by snowstorms blinding objective sight OR the erasure of layers of information by social propagandists....... the end game of climatic calamity..... coupled with the beginning of a new, nascent, psychedelic beauty.
Performance/installation w/Atlanta Poets Group, Rassim, Jean Kern, Luke Leavitt, Vassar Poets Group: paintings, poem objects, drawings, sound recordings, poems, string, glass canisters, balloons, mini-building constructions and adhesives.
David D'Agostino kidnapped the Atlanta Poets Group. They were taken to Bulgaria on a silver ship. Something returned. X (LATTICE), Y (GLYPH), Z (TIME) is a collaborative installation-performance with the APG, Bulgarian painter Rassim and other artists. The 9-hour “in-between-exhibitions-exhibition”, sited at Poem 88 Gallery, consisted of various physical objects (paintings/poetry objects/photos/other), performances, music and sound phenomena. Words are connected to the grid. Life is line-drawn, turned as a table, and unearthed in a city too hussy to bait. Audiences came and went as they pleased. .
While participating in the XXL Group in Sofia, Bulgaria, from 2000 to 2004, David D’Agostino created the classical Balkan Village as a contemporary pop stage comprised of constructed installations of small-scale churches (orthodox and American-style evangelical), mosques, beds, farming tools, gas masks, vegetables, guard stations, wheel-barrows, drawings and paintings.
Audiences visiting the stages became participants in creative, often unrehearsed scenarios engaging visual poetry readings, dancing, musical performances, orthodox chanting and meditations, readings of different texts including ex-communist propaganda and other public interactions.
Revelation attempts to reconcile the patronizing hypocrisy of American political idealism, lingering conflicts wrought by peasant feudalism/communism, the archaic mythology of religious orthodoxy and its influence on communism, and the destruction of traditional culture by local mafia and other influences, including IMF, EU and American monetary policies.
By allowing audiences to help construct each village and create their own readings of local life, D’Agostino was able to shift from an artist-centric to a community narrative.
Various scenarios from these images have been constructed at 14 sites throughout the Balkans, North Africa, and the US.
Multi-stage installation and performance: hand constructed village objects, vegetables, ceramic knick-knacs, cheetos, and other materials.
2000-2011
The particularities involved in the work: this painting of a landscape whited-out; this shard of paper with a line of poetry on it; this painting in oil of an image from a video of a poet reading a poem instigated by a whited-out landscape; this word enmeshed by a lattice of lines connecting words and objects and images to generate a score for performance; these live voices and bodies (and, later, layered recordings) of poets making their ways through such a score to distribute the lattice’s elements into physical space— are but instances, node-points, moments of collision and opportunity within the compound work that is our object.
Many would call this kind of work a process, and it is, but it is a process that is an object, our object, one mobilized to manifest the transindividual subject elaborated above. Its every particularity is a conduit of all the others; at no point does it depart from the poly-objective.
If this evolving sequence of events (performances, works, etc.) is not simply to fall back and be re-engulfed by the frames of expectation that pertain to the work of discrete, reified individuals, new frames must be created, further steps taken. There comes a time when making a distinction between D’Agostino and the APG (and others, always others) no longer makes sense. That the work is transindividually conceived, constituted, and enacted— all the while remaining open to a potentially endless process of reiteration and reformulation— must come to replace the faulty notions of the lone individual and his finished art-object product as worthwhile aesthetic paradigms. This is the subject we proclaim: we is an Agent, that is, a transindividual subject, irreducible to any One.
Our subject is an object and our object is a subject (a möbius mapping is entirely appropriate). Every impact between objects is unavoidably aesthetic. That every I is a conduit of a transindividual, polysubjective We-Agent (that itself becomes a poly-objective object) is mirrored precisely by work that is a process, a process that is an object, an object that is not one: the works that we are created through and that we create.
The work is an Agent, and the work is a We.
--The Atlanta Poets Group and David D’Agostino
Multi-media performance with APG
2010
Landschaft 59 explores our alienated distance from the natural environment. We admire the mountain landscape, we long for the prestine wetlands...... but rarely gather our senses to touch them. They exist as not-so-profound losses that are packaged and employed for a-visceral realities.
Multi-media performance with Tyler Christopherson, David Cryar, Claire Leavitt, and poem object and projection by APG.
Outdoor poem objects derived from the lattice poem 'Tableaux Vivants' by James Sanders, Atlanta Poets Group.
5' x 1'
Denver foothills
Text on paper, ice, water, branches
2012
A continuation of 'Low Ghosts', Signature rerum wall installations combine the dislocated context of previous visual art exhibits (hosted by major institutions like the High Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, ect) with multifarious poetic responses and audience-induced performance to create other stuff.....material and non-material liminoids to be reinvented at a later date?
Wall installation: paintings, original and found photographs, ear wax samples, poems by the APG, tape, balloons, and wall writings.
Alphabet Species explores how any visual product exists in a temporal state and is open to infinite sound, musical and literary interpretations.
Alphabet Species embraces the playful nature of Froebel's Kindergarten Gifts combined with the anarchist tendencies of the Romanian poet Isou's avant-garde letrism. Each constructed work explores the universal language of sounds and objects in space. This liminal strategy is documented by intermedia diagrams and improvised playbacks.
As an example, the work 'Bi-Fud-Hu-Uhhhhh-Elk-Lek' is composed of a laser-cut elk image, five 45-magnum adhesives, letters, architectonic lines, and craft ovals on wood panels. When read as a visual poem, the reader may literally try to connect them in a logical narrative (violence against animals, ourselves, etc) OR simply spit out phonemes and other primordial sounds that affirm the liminal, abstract nature of all objects. Any interpretation will do.
Acrylic, laser wood and adhesive cut-outs, plumbing joints, puff balls, sumi ink, glitter, and found natural objects on wood and canvas supports.
2009-2010
David D’Agostino's artistic intentions bypass parochial codifications of art as a finished object in time and space. Applying the principles of early Fluxus artists, D'Agostino explores the liminal space that exists between the creation of one object or idea and its subsequent re-imagining. The recent Alphabet Species and (X) (Y) (Z) exhibits, collaborations with the Atlanta Poets Group, were featured in November at the National Gallery of Art in Sofia, Bulgaria (2010) and at Poem (88) Gallery in Atlanta (2011). D'Agostino has exhibited at the Akhnaton Gallery, Cairo, Egypt; Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta; XXL Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; Fine Arts Academy , Bucharest, Romania; Skopje Cultural Center, Skopje, Macadonia, Krause Gallery, Atlanta; Black Sea Archeological Museum, Varna; Hause E, Ludwigshafen, Germany; MOXY, New Orleans; and Galeria Debla, Granada, Spain, among others.
Liminal space interrogations
