As we continue to build the world around us, the landscape of our own creation stands in stark contrast to the natural world in which it exists. For the last 10 years, I have made machines and landscapes that seek to collapse that distance through reconstructed natural phenomena and isolated architectural inventions.
These machines re-present natural phenomena as a function of (or metaphor for) the cultural, economic and social systems that guide our personal and professional interactions. Each employs an elaborately constructed bureaucracy of parts to recreate a single simple event: a whispering breeze, a dusting of snow, or a threatening storm.
These events, however, are approximations, and in their architecture they are constructed as dark homologues of their natural counterparts. That summer breeze could also be a swarm of locusts; the quiet snowfall never ends and silently buries the town below; and the thundering storm vibrates and quivers just enough to set the whole room on edge. The machines become depopulated landscapes, and those populations re-appear as hives and mountain towns set on elaborate scaffolds or simply grown from the walls themselves. These constructions recall Mediterranean towns, Pueblo villages, and Brazilian favelas, but they are lifted from their foundations, floating above the floor and separated from the landscapes on which they should rely. They are at once fantastic and tragic, as the sense of community and inventiveness they enjoy is conflated with an absolute inhabitability. Without their connection to some land, they are both isolated and isolating.
David McQueen lives and works in Brooklyn New York. He is a 2011 NYFA Fellow in Sculpture. His work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of Art, Plane Space Gallery, Parker’s Box, Smack Mellon, The Dumbo Arts Center and the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art.