The Ancient Machine
Collage and Acrylic Paint
Collage and Acrylic Paint
Collage and Acrylic Paint
Collage and Acrylic Paint
Collage
Artist Statement:
My art is constantly changing. As much as it’s about anything it’s about the interactions that take place between the artist and his or her environment. I make what I’m given to make, but I pay particular attention to walking a fine line between the arbitrary and the thematically coherent. I like the suggestion of narrative, but ultimately the many narratives we are all familiar with are a bore. I like how chance introduces elements of the absurd and how the resulting juxtapositions suggest a reality I’m more familiar with than any contrivance an artist or poet might come up with. Art is about pushing back, but also about allowing a certain amount of formal flow to intermingle with what verges on what a professional designer might call Bad Design. Out of chaos comes order (hopefully). I’m just constantly astounded, when making art out of what amounts to debris, how everything usually works out.
David Dodd Lee is the author of ten full-length books of poems & a chapbook, including Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues Press, 1997), Arrow Pointing North (Four Way Books, 2002), Abrupt Rural (New Issues Press, 2004), The Nervous Filaments (Four Way Books, 2010) Orphan, Indiana (University of Akron Press, 2010), Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, the Ashbery Erasure Poems (BlaxeVox, 2010), Animalities (Four Way Books, 2014), & And Other’s, Vaguer Presences (BlazeVox, 2018), a second book of Ashbery erasure poems. He has published fiction and poetry in many literary magazines (including The Nation, Copper Nickel, Chattahoochee Review, and Diode) & is currently making final edits on Flood, a novel. He is also a painter, collage artist, and a photographer. Since 2014 he has been featured in three one person exhibitions, mixing collage & poetry texts into single improvisational art works. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, The Hunger, The Rumpus, and Twyckenham Notes. In 2016 he began making sculpture, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. Unlucky Animals, a book of collages, original poems, erasures, and dictionary sonnets is forthcoming in 2019. Lee is Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press.