Devin Powers is a Brooklyn based artist whose work I recently became aware of through his brother, who I met in a creative writing class at the Harvard Extension School we're both taking. I don't have much in way of art criticism chops, so I won't pretend to understand Devin's work enough to speak on it at length; his drawings and paintings effect the same sort of complex emotional and intellectual response I have to other excellent abstract artists like Pollack and Kandinsky, so that must mean something good. The man himself has this to say about his work:
My work is made up of rudimentary geometric shapes. Sometimes these
shapes are arranged to look like something already in the world; for example, a
maze or a sheet of lined paper. More often the arrangement is abstract. Although
the abstract work does not represent any object in a concrete way, it often has a
familial resemblance to things other than itself, such as network visualizations,
generative algorithms, mathematical structures, star constellations, and complex
systems. There are also strong stylistic connections to Gothic architecture and
Islamic ornament, Russian Constructivism, Minimalism and Modernist
abstraction. I do not want my work to be seen as hermetic; these associations are
intentional and a part of the work. I am interested in creating powerful emotion through form and material.
Expression is more important than concept in my work. The particular kind and
degree of emotion changes from work to work but overall I aim to evoke
something fundamental, omnipresent, interconnected, and overwhelming.
I'll be doing a Q & A with Devin sometime in the near future. In the meantime, check out other examples of his work here, or this interview he did with Brent Hallard at Visual Discrepancies.
No comments:
Post a Comment