Sculptor Celebrates the Transformative Power of Art
This comes to us from visual artist Reggie Davis, who works in a variety of media including creating sculptures from found objects.
“Reggie was one of the 2017 regional finalist for the Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series West Coast.
“He’s also been featured in several national and international art and fashion publications suc as ‘Art Reveal Magazine’ out of Finland, the UK Aesthetica Magazine, andt he fashion and beauty magazine I-Mirage.”
~crevado.com
As a self-taught visual artist I’ve also been interested in the transformative power of art, that, I see as a metaphor for mental alchemy. Changing our experience of reality through the creative process expands our intuitions, and offers us greater Illumination into our own self-mastery.
The “Art of transformation”, comes through working with discarded 2D and 3D materials. The sustainability call to action, imprinted directly in the artwork allowing me to challenge the factuality of materiality by altering and modifying an objects utilitarian purpose, translated into a new visual language, a new aesthetic, while retaining aspects of its conceptual purpose and history.
Most of the 3D objects are transformed into abstract open-framework figurative sculptures. While 2D discarded photographic, sourced imagery and other ephemeral materials becomes the materials for collages, and mixed media assemblage.
For the sculptures each figurative symbolizes an active return to the body.
Showing the body as a framework analogous to the major skeleton, like our bodies provide structure and stability, containing the potential for emotional connection, containment and release. Archetypal, open-framework figurative’s that the viewer activates by their story; fill with their own personal iconography.
The majority of my figurative’s are based on what has been called, in want of a better word “African Primitivism”. Utilizing “primitivism” compositional devices, its sophisticated approach to the abstraction of the human form. Works inspired by religious ideals and spiritual experiences. Works that are unselfconscious as art and where a great amount of mechanical craftsmanship is still required.
Primitivism also allows for the creation of a visual study of the inner connections between various realms of our social-cultural reality; focuses on cultural diaspora and the drift of “primitivist” art into contemporary art.
