David Spriggs
Penticton Art Gallery, Penticton, BC - To Oct 25
Born in Manchester, England, in 1978, David Spriggs moved to Canada in 1992. He received an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal following a BFA from Emily Carr University in Vancouver, where he currently resides. Spriggs is known for combining aspects of painting and sculpture in his large-scale, ephemeral installations. In 1999, he developed a layering method using carefully spatialized painted transparencies, a technique he refers to as the Stratachrome. His PAG exhibition features two works, First Wave (2021) and Paradox of Power (2007).
First Wave is comprised of 90 transparent sheets painted red and layered to suggest a towering tidal wave, or tsunami. Created during the COVID-19 pandemic and premiered at the Oku-Noto Triennale in Suzu, Japan, First Wave references both the pandemic and Japanese art history, specifically Hokusai’s woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1831).
For Paradox of Power, Spriggs has installed a life-size model of a stratified bull, cut in two and displayed upside down, legs in the air, in two side-by-side cases 8 by 10 feet. That one half of the bull is red and the other blue brings to mind the anaglyphic binary that allows red and blue image components a stereoscopic effect when viewed through corresponding 3-D glasses. This binary could be extended to the social realm, with respect to an American political system that has the country divided into red and blue states.
“Spriggs’s work,” writes Erin Manning in Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (2012), “invites us to see-with what is not actually there and to move-with the constellation of what we’re beginning to see. Moving-with perception composing itself, we experience the dynamics of an object becoming spacetime.”
