11.28 : david hoffos – a review
I really enjoy David Hoffos’ work. It’s at once charming and spectral. His early sculptures from art school were all so precise and well-crafted, like little shrines or fetish objects. I also like that he isn’t particularly interested in using the “newest” technology, in favour of using whatever’s around, whatever works.
In an artist's statement I found online, Hoffos explains that he “reveal[s] and examine[s] the sources of illusion found within traditional sources of entertainment such as “genre movies”.
I can definitely see what he means — his work often seems to be chiefly concerned with creating an illusionary sense of immersion — like his large scale miniature cities as in Catastrophe and Another City; very amusement-park-like, with a heavy element of spectacle.
But can it, then, be framed as a critique? He seems to try, though his methods are similar. I personally don’t think that his work is particularly subversive, it plays into mainstream genre slightly. Not to say that an artist has to be completely esoteric to be good, mind.
Returning again to his use of obsolete media materials, I find THAT idea to be far more subversive than commenting on the illusory nature of postmodern entertainment, which seems to be mostly escapist by its very defintion. I think that I have been particularly seduced by the thought of newer, better, faster, stronger equipment that will be able to edit my footage for me and then maybe make breakfast. He, on the other hand, has fairly shunted the digital. I’m sure it’s probably about a million times more labour intense, but I wonder whether or not he ultimately gets more out of the process than I do … I’ve been known to get frustrated looking at the same screen hour after hour without any kind of physical break … and time gets sucked into a portal when you’re working on a keyboard and a mouse, for some reason.
It’s one of the reasons I’m taking sculpture next semester, I feel like I’ve lost the sense of tactility in media, working with all these little ones and zeros and blank, unshapeable screens. David Hoffos, on the other hand, seems to delve really deeply into media while still keeping that visceral hold on the sculptural elements of creating space. His media installations are some of the best I’ve seen as a result of it; media comes slightly secondary to the construction of a space through all of these elements combined.
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