David Bordett: Sculpture MFA '23

David Bordett spent much of the last half decade on shoestring-budget road trips in his tiny blue Toyota Tacoma, a tired old truck that now has well over 300,000 miles.

 

With each passing mile marker, the truck began to function more like an extension of the studio. First-person observations became sculptural materials: a gas station attendant of herculean stature petting a baby squirrel named Opal tucked tenderly in his breast pocket, a sign on a mountain reading ENDLESS CAVERNS looming over the highway like an ominous backwoods Hollywood sign, or a solar panel array shimmering in the 100-degree heat of a Nevada summer that appears briefly to be a predator spacecraft lying in wait. All these encounters collected, and like brief, lyrical dispatches are mailed back to the studio to be cut up and stitched together in a process-focused practice akin to a kind of meth lab alchemy.

*these seemingly distinct objects together create a constellation that comprises a whole

Here within the walls of the studio, an oft shambolic–but always sensitive–relationship to physical materials unfolds that seeks out the transcendent in the lowly, the ignoble, and the gutter. Ultimately, the transmutation that occurs gives birth to a kaleidoscopic Americana that embraces the uncomfortable simultaneity of its surreal allure, and its eldritch relationship to both past and future. Above all else, the work is ever guided by a shapeshifting North Star that leads not in a cardinal direction, but instead points toward the act of searching for, longing for, and on rare occasion witnessing, something hidden in experience.

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