David McDonalad: Project Room | Montello
Present between polished slabs and poised honeycomb structures, moments of silence occupy negative spaces, allowing for luminous pause and childlike fixation.
David B. Smith Gallery is pleased to present Montello, a solo exhibition of new sculpture by Los Angeles-based artist David McDonald.
While steeped in stillness and solitude at The Montello Foundation, a remote Nevadan artist residency, David McDonald spent two weeks in the summer of 2019 creating the five works featured in the exhibition. Completely isolated, off the grid, and without the looming presence of technology or any face-to-face human interaction whatsoever, the influence of the high desert is reflected in Montello.
Present between polished slabs and poised honeycomb structures, moments of silence occupy negative spaces, allowing for luminous pause and childlike fixation.
Compelled to exercise ideas through humble materials in the lofty language of pure abstraction, David McDonald’s Montello is an ode to forces greater than oneself. Without intending specific meaning or narrative of any kind, spindly wall works and globular forms alike communicate through their thingness; via their existence alone. Similarly to how there is no innate specific meaning to the bark of a tree or the curvature of a stone, McDonald describes his work as functioning the same way, as “a thing not a metaphor.”
