David Fitzgerald “No Escape”

David Fitzgerald “No Escape”

Viridian Artists, Inc.

This event has ended.

Viridian Artists presents an exhibit of new work by David Fitzgerald.

David Fitzgerald’s practice has changed recently. For many years, he focused on making sculptural pieces but when the pandemic struck, the process involved felt exhausting and overwhelming. In the past, his three-dimensional work had incorporated photography. Over the past two years, he began to use his own photographs and appropriated imagery, drawing on a sheet of paper placed over the photograph and then fusing the sheets of paper with epoxy. The work is painterly and visually provocative. Many of the images were shot out of the window of his Brooklyn studio during the lockdown. They echo the sense of entrapment that we felt during those early days.

It’s Rear Window without the murder. People are observed doing the most ordinary things, reading, listening to music, smoking a cigarette. There’s a poignancy to these images, a yearning.

Fitzgerald grew up in New York City and moved away for many years, but he recently returned to Brooklyn. During the pandemic, he was reminded that as a city dweller you are really never alone. “There are always people in the street or outside in the backyards of the brownstones on our block,” he writes. “Home a lot, I began to take photographs of them. In a sense the images are voyeuristic, but they’re also empathetic.” Fitzgerald also includes work that features a July 4th Celebration during the pandemic at Rip Van Winkle, a miniature golf course in upstate New York, and other-worldly images taken in Taos, which was the last trip he took before the world shut down.

Viridian’s first encounter with Fitzgerald’s work was a juried competition at the gallery which he entered with three dimensional dioramas incorporating photography inside box-like structures and was selected for the Director’s Choice digital presentation that occurs simultaneously during the exhibit. With “Director’s Choice” alongside the juror’s choices, Viridian emphasizes the reality that everyone sees art in their own way and each juror selects different favorites. Subsequently, Fitzgerald became a Viridian Artist. This is his first solo exhibition at the gallery.

Media

• Photography
• Prints

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