NYAB Event - David Opdyke "Manifest Destination"

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At Ronald Feldman Fine Arts
Media: Drawing, Sculpture

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Manifest Destination is an exhibition of recent sculptures and drawings by David Opdyke. A self-proclaimed “NPR junkie,” Opdyke deftly engages a wide range of contemporary themes with subtle humor and controlled chaos.

Opdyke’s process is open-ended; he begins with a few structural rules and a limited kit of components, and allows the work to grow intuitively. He likens the building process to metastasis: “a barely-controlled accumulation of elements leading to decisions and forms I would never have anticipated or predicted.” The result of this guided entropy is exemplified in large sculptures such as Zenith (2008) and Dredge (2007).

In direct juxtaposition to six large-scale sculptures, the artist will exhibit a group of miniature wall sculptures. Opdyke uses miniaturization to propose projects of absurd ambition and size while maintaining a sense of authenticity. “In the grown-up world, a scale model presents a convincing alteration of reality, conveying authority and the existence of a well-considered plan. At the same time, models are a branch of the toy family: they can lend their credibility to half-baked and preposterous schemes.”

Themes of accumulation and disarray are further developed in Opdyke’s drawings. A seemingly straightforward rendering of land masses, upon closer inspection, becomes heaps of empty packages and detritus, as seen in works like Mini Storage and Inventory (2008). The aggregation of objects can take over the characteristics of a landscape, forcing an inversion of foreground and background. We no longer encounter objects in a landscape, but a landscape of objects.

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