Banner Day—On the Photography of David Humphrey
I put the finishing touches on the last painting for my 2017 exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser the day before the election and had my opening the night of the inauguration. The first day of the show was declared “a day without art” in solidarity with the Women’s March happening around the country, which I attended in its New York version. Most days are a day without my art, but I was as appalled and traumatized as the people around me and happy to focus on the collective gesture of protest. The works in that show acquired unexpected new meanings in that context, but the political landscape also inflected how I was to develop new work. An exhibition is often a time to pause or reflect on one’s practice before beginning again, but my nausea at the turn in American politics was too fresh and disorienting to be productive.
Between my home and studio in Long Island City was a (now gone) sign and banner printer that I had imagined could be employed to make artworks if the right occasion arose. Aporia provided that occasion, and so I emailed a snapshot from my phone to be printed five by seven feet on vinyl with grommets. I picked it up the next day on the way to my studio and thus began a yearlong adventure collaborating with, vandalizing, augmenting, or haunting photographs taken mostly during that routine Long Island City commute. Protagonists could be conjured from banal locations. Garbage, dirty snow, or construction sites could be recycled as the unexpectedly special.
Sidewalks and streets are an ever-changing ground for painting-like marks, spills, and assemblage. Gravity holds everything in place as we move over it on foot or in a vehicle. When the seen thing becomes a printed photograph, one has time to linger on all the details we presumably saw but sensibly forgot because our brain would explode if we didn’t. But in a painting, it is rewarding to care about each and every detail, and to care again and again. Painting on these enlarged snapshots was a way to reinhabit a recently exited past with the ability to project back into it or to conjure things and beings from it. Each painting here emerged from a series of improvisations or gestures. Sometimes squeezing a tube of paint onto the print and pushing it around was enough to establish contact with the photograph’s weird otherness. The oscillating process of damage and repair gives my relationship to the image a charge that I hope anticipates the way passing viewers will regard these artworks on the black and white pages of DIVISION/Review. Please draw on them.
David Humphrey is a New York artist who has shown nationally and internationally. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize, among other awards. An anthology of his art writing, Blind Handshake, was published by Periscope Publishing in 2010. He teaches in the MFA program at Columbia and is represented by the Fredericks & Freiser Gallery in New York, NY.
