Spitting into the Wind
Will Douglas
April 12 - May 5, 2022
Opening reception Friday, April 12th 6-9pm.
Spitting Into The Wind is the New York solo debut exhibition of Will Douglas, presented by Bob’s Gallery.
Central to the work of Will Douglas is the notion of wandering. Douglas maintains a peripatetic studio practice, and enacts a committed practice of walking in the city, most frequently in triangulation between his home, studio, and work. Through ambulatory journeys carried out in Brooklyn and elsewhere, points of fascination are transformed into images. Throughout his work, there is always a level of indeterminacy about the source of the image and its originality; images appear to be found or look like stock images, but are always purposefully taken, selected, and translated across supporting surfaces.
Consider for instance, Love Boat (there’s no humor in heaven). Douglas encountered a boat on fire on Hillsborough River Tampa, Florida in 2020, while on a walk. Transfixed by this seductive but harmless spectacle, he filmed it, framing it as a landscape, as well as a campfire, which surreally unfolds and reverses on an endless loop. The supports of the igloo water containers conjure up a contrasting landscape of competitive sports games, and vessels used for liquids on construction sites. The accompanying audio track, ambient and barely audible, is a weather forecast for Columbus Day recorded while driving and making a delivery to the UN. In this work and others, Douglas brings together seemingly conflicting vernaculars and references, and synthesizes them into something that coheres yet never neatly resolves.
Windless Night derives from a video filmed in 2018 in Madrid while making his book FLAT PICTURES (YOU CAN FEEL). Considering the influence of the deluge of digital images on how we experience and encounter the physical world, he splayed apart an object of his own making, transforming it into material ripe for appropriation. Its physical presentation, stapled to a handmade walnut frame, clashes together divergent display methods simultaneously calling to mind the way in which advertisements and posters are tacked to construction sites and telephone poles, as well as the way in which paintings are framed.
Douglas’s examination of the means through which images are produced, circulate, and are propped up continues in Mangrove, in which a shadowy greyscale photo taken on Coffee Pot Bayou in St. Petersberg, Florida is UV printed on a vinyl banner with brass grommets. The UV printing method calls back to Douglas’s earlier use of cyanotypes in his photographic practice, while also suggesting everyday encounters with images on commercial banners. 12 IN THE MONEY enlarges a greyhound racing program cheat sheet from the final day of greyhound racing at Derby Lane. Douglas screen printed in an edition of 50, each one unique, allowing for flaws and chance occurrences in the printing process, evoking the repetitive nature of the race, and the physical nature of the rubs, rolls, folds, and fondles of the discarded tickets.
Two more overtly sculptural works, Charlie Hustle and Rip It take common objects and transform them via casting into useless versions of themselves. Rip It takes the form of a strength gripper like that Douglas used in 2021 following a hand injury. Cast in aluminum, it would break if squeezed with full force, and has been oxidized using a consumer laundry product, with connection points of the cast left bare. Charlie Hustle is according to Douglas “an object to be examined in its flaw.” A sterling silver cast of a bent nail, it subverts an object with specific utility into one to instead be considered for its form and material quality.
This sparse arrangement of works initially seems disparate, but loose formal rhymes and resonances begin to emerge. The barely visible ring of the bullfight image of Windless Night is echoed in the circular forms of the water coolers in Love Boat; the foliage in Love Boat finds a counterpart in Mangrove; textual fragments appear on the water coolers of Love Boat along with in 12 IN THE MONEY; a throughline of sports and physical activity connects Windless Night, Rip It, and the water containers in Love Boat. Spectacles of various kinds – a bull fight, a dog race, a boat on fire – are present yet kept at a distance, arrested and quieted.
Douglas’s work can perhaps be concisely characterized through the lens of the Situationist idea of the dérive, in French a “drift” through the city, defined by Guy Debord as “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.” The works that Douglas makes come from a practice of dérive, though also take on lives of their own, seeming to drift and echo, unmoored and perpetually wandering.
BIO
Will Douglas (born 1988, Charleston, SC) received a BFA in Photography and Film at VCUarts in 2012 and an MFA in Studio Art in 2015. Solo exhibitions include Gone to the Dogs and Montage Rver at Tempus Volta (Tampa, FL), Drawing on the Hearts of Men at Quaid Gallery (Tampa, FL). He has been included in group exhibitions at the Tampa Museum of Art (Tampa, FL) Peripheral Vision at Candela (Richmond, VA), Light Factory (Charlotte, NC), Florida Biennial at the Hollywood Arts and Culture Center (Hollywood, FL), Below Grand (New York, NY), Bob’s Gallery (New York, NY), and Morris Adjmi Architects (New York, NY). He will be included in Skyway Contemporary at the MFA St Petersburg in 2024.
He co-founded the artist-run space Parallelogram Gallery in Tampa, FL in 2015.. His 2019 monograph FLAT PICTURES (YOU CAN FEEL) is both in private and public collections. Douglas divides his time between Brooklyn, NY and St. Petersburg, FL.