Max in his Pool (Primary Title)
David A. Douglas, American, born 1958 (Artist)
"I push around and build compositions with a keyboard, mouse, scanners, and printers in the same way I push around oils on a canvas. The work is no more about the medium than painting is about a paintbrush or a photograph about a camera." —DavidA. Douglas
Working in northern Virginia, Douglas builds up bits and pieces of found imagery from digital scans to depict nonexistent places. The distressed surfaces of his images are complex and recall Douglas’s experience as a painter and collagist. These surfaces and moody subjects bring to mind allegorical images made by 19th-century pictorial photographers. Max in His Pool is one print in a series that explores Douglas’s relationship with his children. This print combines imagesand raw material gathered over twelve years. Each object seems laden with symbolic import, like a prophetic vision or a bad dream. Max is displaced from the center and set at an uncomfortable distance from the viewer, who is inside the kitchen.Rather than acting as a voyeur, the viewer is cast in the role of an anxious guardian over a child blissfully ignorant of his own vulnerability.
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