Danny Balgley
My recent paintings explore the intersection of technology, queerness and materiality - through a process of arranging and deconstructing scenes that weave together recontextualized objects, gestures and abstraction. I often depict different modes of technology such as construction equipment, structural armatures, building materials and trash - repurposing them with an unintended use, creating new technologies imbued with mutant possibilities. This inversion of technologies and objects can also be interpreted as a form of queerness, to free them from the constraints of their previous existence into untold realms of possibility and functionality. Some pieces hint at the figurative, almost approximating portraiture - but disintegrate before a form is ever realized. Surfaces are adorned and hyphenated with gestural markings that appear as dreamlike threads, phasing in and out of recognizable language and symbols - simultaneously caressing and defacing the picture plane like ancient cave markings or modern graffiti. I’m interested in reexamining historical genres of painting which have often been deemed as simply decorative or déclassé (such as trompé-l'œil, vanitas), by inverting their basic tropes and forms to create hallucinatory, living tableaus. Simultaneously historical and ahistorical, this work traces a rich lineage of still life while also carving out new forms yet to be imagined.
