about the work

Mixed-media abstract assemblages address the tension of adapted temporary shelters and marginalized struggle by exploring an exodus from a negative, violent situation to a place of hope and growth. Personal experience with homelessness and observations of homeless camps in Louisville and Los Angeles led this intuitively improvised practice to show contingent, provisional markers of urgency, chance, and mistakes. Formal concerns of materiality of paint and surface expand the field of painting beyond the second dimension, thus addressing the limited support structures available to the less advantaged. The combination of viscous neutral house paint and drawn perspective lines with subversive applications of blue and orange pigment covers discarded materials and tarpaulin as tent structures. Remaining palimpsests of scraped-off or wiped-away paint on the surface of unstructured, construction-type materials are created with subtractive processes that explore entropy, self-sabotage, and disintegration. This series questions the extent of an artist’s moral obligation to those seen as the excluded and the disposable.

David Conrad lives and works in Louisville, KY, where he completed a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 2020 at the Hite Art Institute, University of Louisville. David also spent time studying at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs and Boulder, and Indiana University Southeast. 

In 2011 and 2012 David helped out at the experimental contemporary art gallery Land of Tomorrow.