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Email PageHiggins: 2006
February 9, 2006- March 11, 2006
Daina Higgins
Elizabeth Harris
529 W 20th St Daina Higgins Bus Town (2005) |
In a recent statement describing her work Daina writes:
“I am continually entranced by the city and the detritus and decay within and surrounding it. Growing up in the Rust Belt, my playground was the post-industrial landscape. I learned to embrace this environment as a new frontier and came to see the hard won beauty among its quotidian aspects. Abandoned factories, rail yards, and warehouse districts became a place for art making and were conductive to my 12-year graffiti practice. This process altered my perception of the city. One could say that this perception of the ‘new' American landscape has allowed me to maintain spirituality as an artist living and working in New York City .
I begin by going for long journeys in the style of the ‘flaneur', the early 20 th Century phenomenon of the idle wanderer of the urban night. These dandies traipsed aimlessly through the streets of European cities after the advent of electric light. I choose any area based on its industrial quotient, and photograph objects and situations, in the day or at night. The photograph is used as a reference from which I visually dissect all the objects and beginning with the furthest in the picture plane, I draw its outline on paper and cut a stencil through which I spray paint on the panel. This begins a layering process in which I re-trace each stencil and use the outline as a marker for the next object closer to the viewer, which in turn gets drawn, cut out and painted. As I paint I bend and manipulate the stencil to achieve a desired effect. I mostly use black and white cans of Rustoleum and occasional color.
These paintings are made with spray paint, graffiti's seminal material. They are the result of developing a studio practice out of a rogue street practice. Places and traditions of the sub-culture are evident in the subject and others have been re-figured, such as the scale. The small scale of the work preserves the integrity of the spray paint and presents an intimate viewing experience that is appropriate for an indoor setting.”
Art Reviews of Higgins: 2006
| New York Times March 3, 2006 | Roberta Smith | "...Ms. Higgins's urban scenes refine the spray-can school of art, but they avoid the refinement associated with small, realistic paintings. They might almost be considered very thin, three-dimensional models of photographs..." |
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Elizabeth Harris was last updated: 2008-10-07
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