Artist Statement:David Rigdon
I began with a desire to pair the disparate elements of intellectual modernist abstraction with the perceived ignorance of the commercial painters and construction workers. This work set up a number of contradictions including, but not limited to, painting without paint, highbrow and lowbrow, perceived intelligence and ignorance.
Within these contradictions I noticed a correlation between idealism and reality, as well as a parallel between rationality and biology. It is within human nature to impose our will upon the world. In doing so, we build monuments and cities to show our magnitude. However the greatness being shown is actually just a division of labor. It is the working class and the poor who are facilitating the actions of those few at the top. So the intelligent, educated and intellectual class structures use the more "primitive" working class to do their bidding.
This creates an undertone of a caste system. I find myself torn between the two. I come from poor, working class family. I am only one in my entire extending family to go to college, let alone graduate school. I feel an overwhelming amount of guilt that I get an attempt to intellectualize myself and change my social status, while my family remains where they have always been. It sets up an internal conflict that I struggle with on a daily basis.
This body of work is exploring the contradiction of pairing the ideal with the real and the logical will the biological. The structures themselves are created from imperfect cubes. Cubes represent utopian idealism, logic and order. Meanwhile, the structures are grounded in reality. They are subject to gravity and at times dwarf the viewer. They represent the pairing of the rational and the illogical. I have begun to pair the imagery of zombies with these logical systems of geometry.
I think about zombies as a social critique. Zombies are metaphorical for a number of things, which include, but are not limited to class struggle, new world orders, the history of consuming flesh, society consuming itself and a struggle to become rational or intellectual. I’ve been thinking about zombies as analogous to my structures. My structures and George A. Romero’s films, such as Night of the Living Dead, Dawn, Day and Land of the Dead are constructed in a similar way. Romero’s films create an idealistic, rational critique of society while forcing the viewer to be aware the biological mechanism of fear. We are meant to think critically about what the film is saying while being subjected to the laws of reality.
Zombies become a catalyst for tension. Zombies represent a utopian society void of sexism, racism and classism while also creating the contradiction of chaos among humans. Pairing the images of zombies with the structures also becomes an interesting visual problem to solve. Zombies, like construction work, are a lowbrow subject. Pairing Zombies with geometric abstraction becomes similar to pairing highbrow intellectualism to lowbrow subject matter.
at what point does an artist ask themself, "how the hell did you let your studio space get this way?".
