tatar art projects

Joe Davidson's body of work consists of sculpture and large scale installations made up of cast everyday consumerist objects. The objects are produced in multiples with mundane materials such as scotch tape, paper pulp, and plaster. Davidson tries to achieve a level of mass production in the objects, though all have been handmade. Most of the work is monochromatic, driven largely by the inherent quality and symbolism of the material used. He has been working as if on an assembly line, churning out the same image, looking for eventual meaning, the repetitive and seemingly meaningless actions are explored symbolically as reflections of the passage of time, emotional isolation, and escapist fantasy. The compulsive or obsessive acts required to create the pieces necessitates the omission of other perhaps more traditionally meaningful or useful activities. The viewer is asked to contemplate this notion of what has been lost through the time consuming details of the piece.

There is a qualitative gap between the original and the cast object, however slight. There is a peculiarity, a lack of life, to a cast object that he finds meaningful. There is also autonomy within the cast object, a sense that this is now an object unto itself, separate from the original. It becomes distinct as a new object in the world while referencing its source. It is with these objects that Davidson considers the consuming repetitive acts of daily living, not attempting exact replicas of an original object; he creates shadows of the original.