- Venue
- Works Projects
- Location
- South West England
Surface and finish can be a persuasive indicator when deciphering or responding to an artist’s work in the form of an installation, it being nominally a large part conceptual and the finish being potentially part of a fabrication process. The work of David Wojtowycz has this quality, and something more immediate and real, that of the readymade or found and crafted placed within a more resolute construction, resonating between truth and fiction in the construction of Glen.
A strip light, a recurring motif in Wojtowycz’s work, lights or ‘over-lines’ a series of watercolours and found images, that sits opposed to a constructed wall of steel with an illuminated sign ‘Glen’, slowly cycling through a series of street sign colours. The exposed framework and wiring is persuasive as a location or half stage, a garage or back lot, where private images are re-rendered, scenes or stills left hanging to be found years later, a plot hatched and dreams nullified by the daily grind. The style of the sign compounds this, an aesthetic of the strip mall or downtown store, continuously pulsating through it’s colours.
The image making in the work is multifarious; laser prints mixing with riso-graph and watercolour paintings, all on paper. These mediums lend immediacy, a sense of captured time and specifically with the watercolours, a fast rendering that reveals a consideration or implication by the artist. There is a gratifying presence in the surface of the low quality paper, made of folded found posters or flyers, that works to diffuse the paint, creating a very haptic layer amongst its glossier counterparts, with the transparent or opaque materiality of watercolour lending it dreamlike or hallucinatory feel. The subjects range from what appears as a portrait of siblings, to the newest family member in the form of an early personal computer, to a young man staring out to the viewer. This could appear as a memento, a periscope through a personal biography, but it feels more like a compilation, a subjective render of Glen as a character, reassembled. There is also present a simple pleasure in image making via appropriation, presenting blocks of colour or pattern or by the re-presenting of a found image. The strip of images could be a reel of film but also intimates a progenitor to how we are now afflicted by the always on and continuous stream of image and personal data, albeit without the grubby feel of real life that is present here.
The two singular images, both titled Untitled, are presented bookend style in the installation, separated and opposite each other. Both contain text in a manipulated image, one with a clock spelling out the words d:IE and the other ‘All day, every day, forever’. The former is reminiscent of an 80’s Elm Street Nightmare scenario, a dystopian disturbance from a sleep state, but also retro junk store cool, reinforcing the general aesthetic of Wojtowycz’s work. The latter image has a blacked out car seemingly racing on a precarious road and with all reference erased, we can only project into the image, frustratingly familiar but empty, a flicker of car chases from 70’s TV shows… is it a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am? A Camero?
So the work begs the question, who is Glen? Reading the artists text, just a trucker from Chicago? The clean lines of Glen seem to conflict with the more visceral feel of the content; paintings, prints and found images, as the sign slowly cycles through the LED colours. Maybe that’s the point – the gloss is encompassing, encounter is all, a trick waiting to happen. Wojtowycz constructs might elucidate , or reveal something about someone. His disarming paintings and high end signs are tooled to mess with the readymade and craft of making while undermining our cool knowingness. We think we know, but we don’t, not really.