David Spriggs> Texts

Lyne Crevier,"Estocade", Ici Montreal Magazine, French text on the exhibition The Paradox of Power, 2007. English translation by Jennifer Stroude.

Jean-François Bélisle,"The Paradox of Power", Art Mur publication French text and Andrea Hickey(English text), 2007.

Andrea Hickey "The Paradox of Power", Art Mur publication, English text, 2007.

Tammer El-Sheikh: Selected Sections from: “Trespass: From Pictured Space to Public Place” Compression: Concordia University MFA Studio Arts, ed. Sol Nagar (Montreal: Concordia/Art Mur, 2007), 2007.

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ESTOCADE
Dans I’optique de David Spriggs, déconstruction rime avec reconstruction
Ici Montreal Magazine, by Lyne Crevier, 2007

Des esquisses d’un taureau, amalgame de lignes sinueuses, proches dirait-on de tracés sismiques, sont à l’origine de l’installation
The Paradox of Power, de l’artiste David Spriggs. Et la bête, disposée dans un immense caisson, se présente le corps inversé.
Un paradoxe par rapport au symbole mythologique que pouvait notamment répresenter l’animal sacré dans l’Égypte ancienne,
où sa posture affichait plus de dignité. De pair avec sa force physique, sa fertilité, sa puissance sexuelle. Le taureau de Spriggs
se réincarne toutefois en une autre façon, rappelant en cela le travail de Damien Hirst, ces boites industrielles en verre et acier,
croisement entre cube minimaliste et vitrine de criminaliste. Comme son requin mort conservé dans un aquarium rempli de formol
qui fit scandale. De son côté, Spriggs, artiste de Manchester, doctorant à l’Université Concordia, n’a certes pas la prétention
de la star de Bristol. En revanche, le Montréalais d’adoption s’attaque aux formes sculpturales en mouvement. Dans sa vitrine en
plexiglas, divisée en deux parties monochromes, bleue et rouge, l’animal se montre vulnérable à souhait, offrant l’exact contraire
de l’image du pouvoir qu’il est censé incarner. Il s’en dégage à la fois une aberration physique et une impression évanescente.
À l’aide de peinture à l’aérosol posée sur des couches de film transparent, la volumétrie du taureau s’impose. De sorte que,
vue de face, l’œuvre apparaît en trois dimensions. Mais, de profil, l’abstraction l’emporte, près dune nébuleuse a la Kapoor.
En revanche, Paradoxe du pouvoir rejoint l’art du peintre et sculpteur italien Umberto Boccioni (1882- 1916), auteur notamment
du Manifeste des peintres futuristes. Selon cette poétique futuriste, la <<compénétration de plans colorés, vibrants, pulvérulents,
atomiques>> est essentielle à la construction de formes dynamiques.Chez Spriggs, la force de ses œuvres réside également dans
ce dynamisme fondateur que l’on retrouve aussi chez Muybridge. En particulier, lorsque le photographe s’est appliqué à démontrer
(par maints clichés) que le cheval au galop parvenait un bref instant à décoller ses pattes du sol.De même, le taureau de Spriggs
lévite, même encagé. Formant une synthèse de tous les moments - temps, lieu, forme, couleur, ton.Les mouvements de l’animal
font illusion jusqu’aux formes. Par ailleurs, le processus de déconstruction des images se révèle essentiel par rapport à celui de
la vision. Il s’ensuit alors une vitalité des lignes-forces decomposant la réalité.Au final, le travail de David Spriggs englobe peinture,
dessin, photographic, modélisation et sculpture de manière à créer un système topographique spatial qui lui est propre.
Et si son sujet est reclus, tel un spécimen de laboratoire, il porte volontiers à l’observation et à l’interprétation. *

ESTOCADE
In David Spriggs’ Perspective, Deconstruction Rhymes with Reconstruction
Ici Montreal Magazine, by Lyne Crevier, 2007
English Translation by Jennifer Stroude

Sketches of a bull, a combination of serpentine lines reminiscent of seismic traces, lie at the origin of The Paradox of Power
installation by artist David Spriggs. And the beast, located in a huge box, offers itself to the viewer with an inverted body - a paradox
in respect to the mythological symbol that the sacred animal could have represented in ancient Egypt, where its posture showed
more dignity. Together with its physical strength, its fertility, and its sexual power. However, Spriggs’ bull is reincarnated in another
fashion, echoing Damien Hirst’s work: industrial glass and steel boxes, at the crossroads of minimalist cubes and criminalists’
showcases. For example, Hirst’s dead shark preserved in an aquarium filled with formaldehyde - which created a scandal.
However, Manchester-born Spriggs, PhD student at Concordia University, does certainly not boast the pretension of the Bristol star.
On the other hand, the Montrealer at heart tackles sculptural forms in their movement. In his Plexiglas showcase, divided in two
monochrome parts –blue and red-, the animal is consistently vulnerable, and offers the exact opposite of the power image it is
supposed to embody. It simultaneously radiates physical aberration and evanescence. The bull’s volume imposes itself through
the spray paint applied on transparent film. So that when facing it, the work appears three-dimensional. But when viewed from the
side, abstraction takes over and a Kapoor-like nebula comes to mind. Nevertheless, The Paradox of Power coincides with the work
of Italian painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), author, among other things, of the Futurist Painters’ Manifesto.
According to his futuristic poetics, the “compenetration of colourful, vibrant, powdery, atomic planes” is essential to the construction
of dynamic shapes. The power of Spriggs’ works of art also lies in this founding energy that can be found in Muybridge’s work as well.
Particularly when the photographer strove to demonstrate, through many snapshots, that for a brief instant, the running horse
managed to lift his legs off the ground. Similarly, Spriggs’ bull levitates, even when in a cage. Forming a synthesis of all instants
– time , place, form, colour, tone. The animal’s moves are deceptive even in their shapes. Additionally, the image deconstruction
process turns out to be crucial when compared to that of vision. As a result, there is a vitality of lines – forces that decompose reality.
Ultimately, David Spriggs’ art combines painting, drawing, photography, set design and sculpture in order to create a topographical
spatial system that belongs to him only. While his subject is withdrawn, as a lab specimen, it nevertheless leads to observation
and interpretation.

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Texte par Jean-François Bélisle

À ses débuts, David Spriggs travaillait principalement sur la déconstruction et la reconstruction de la matière.
Une oeuvre de 2003, Still Life, nous présente l’intérieur de deux mallettes de voyages. Semblable à une image
de valises observées à travers une machine à rayon X à l’aéroport, cette oeuvre nous montre le contenu des valises.
Chaque objet est illustré au moyen de tracés bidimensionnels superposés. Les valises sont déconstruites pour former
un tout cartésien qui semble appartenir au monde des cartes géographiques. Cette déconstructions témoigne d’un désir
de comprendre, d’analyser froidement les choses.

Simultanément, l’ar tiste utilisait le même procédé pour construire tout en camouflant les parties contingentes de ses
oeuvres. Dans Incorporeal Movement (2004) et Perceptible Consciousness (2001), les couches individuelles ne sont
plus discernables. Les tracés font place à des formes amorphes don’t les densités semblent s’entremêler. Spriggs construit
ainsi une matière tout en lui donnant une qualité incorporelle. Dans ces constructions, le tout apparaît indivisible.
À travers ces constructions, Spriggs développe son raport émotionnel à l’art et au monde qui l’entoure.

L’oeuvre qu’il nous présente aujourd’hui combine ces deux approches. The Paradox of Power (2007) déconstruit le
mouvement du taureau, à la façon des études photographiques du dix-neuvième-siècle d’Eadward Muybridge et

d’Étienne Jules Marey sur le mouvement. La superposition des différentes strates de cette oeuvre donne naissance aux
volumes de la bête, tout en la transformant en un cousin éloigné de Shiva. Dans le cas de la déesse Hindou, la multiplication
de bras représentait ses capacités surhumaines. Alors que chez Spriggs, la multiplication des pattes semble amoindrir les
capacités de l’animal. Cette faiblesse perçue est,accentuée par la position inversée de l’animal et la division de son corps
en deux moitiés monochromes. Le rouge et le bleu se rejoignent, mais ne semblent pas former un tout. Cette juxtaposition
du chaud et du froid rend l’animal encore plus instable. Ces deux couleurs primaires se combattent pour former un tout
tridimensionnel qui n’existe que dans les yeux de l’observateur. L’allusion aux contradictions du pouvoir contenue
dans le titre de l’oeuvre évoque aussi cette instabilité. Des idées de pouvoir politique, économique et sexuelle nous
viennent tout de suite à l’esprit. Le taureau est habituellementvu comme un animal fort et puissant ; tout l’inverse de ce
que Spriggs nous présente ici. Pouvoir renversé ou désillusions de l’artiste quant aux rapports de force dans la société
occidentale ? La déconstruction et construction simultanées que l’on retrouve dans The Paradox of Power met de
l’avanttout autant son rapport cartésien et émotionnel au pouvoir.

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subject: The Paradox of Power

Art Mur Publication May 2007

The Paradox of Power-David Spriggs

Text by Andria Hickey

Indeed, all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A

profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and

disappears. On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina,

moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like

rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four

legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.

David Spriggs’ large-scale sculptural installation, The Paradox of Power, is an investigation of rapid change,
deconstruction and symbolic revolution. In the same vain as the Futurists, Spriggs is interested in the representation
of time and motion in the sculptural form. Using layering as a device, Spriggs has developed “an environment that
breaks free from the laws that constrict both two and three-dimensional materials, bringing together painting, drawing,
photography, digital-modeling, and sculpture, to create a spatial topographic system”.

Spriggs airbrushes two-dimensional images onto multiple sheets of transparent film, which are hung together in horizontal
cuts to form a three dimensional object. Here, the exhibited form is without edges, dismantling itself and coming together
again in an act of cinematic play. His amorphous objects have the appearance of being suspended, contained and locked
in a frozen moment, where time becomes a stratified cartography. The forms are illuminated and encased in museological
terrariums-like scientific specimens of movement on display, becoming “alienated from the outside environment and open
to observation and interpretation”.

For the exhibition of his graduate thesis at Art Mur, Spriggs has installed of a life-size model of a stratified bull, cut in two,
with each end displayed in two adjacent cases, each a sublime eight feet high and ten feet wide. Spriggs’ investigation of
the multiplicity of time and its relationship to the sculptural form is here transcribed in his an analysis of the bull as a semiotic
agent. By literally deconstructing the bull through a layering of transparent stratum, the mythologized ‘power’ the bull
represents is “fragmented, and reconstructed in an alternate reality.”The bull is rendered immobile, flipped upside down,
legs in the air. The form is further transformed in the plastic anaglyphic binary colours of each half -- a paradox of
red and blue. This binary references not only the deconstructive possibilities of vision itself, but also an antithesis of power
in the corporeality of the bull contained, divided and sacrificially immobilized.. Like Muybridge’s running horse, Spriggs
uses the representation of serialized time to suggest a paradoxical ordering of symbolic power.

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Selected Sections from:“Trespass: From Pictured Space to Public Place” Compression: Concordia University MFA Studio Arts,
ed. Sol Nagar (Montreal: Concordia/Art Mur, 2007)

In the work of Susi Brister, David Spriggs, Christophe Jivraj and Véronique Malo, the Modernist pretence of purity, in its photographic
mode especially, is exposed and exploded. Through Brister’s meditations on the impossibility of representational neutrality, and Spriggs’s
architectural reconstruction of the medium as a (dubious) technology of cultural memory, a fine line appears between the photograph’s
indexical power and its ‘truth-telling’ capacity…
…David Spriggs’s Reconstruction Series (2006) slips in under the fence to wreak an historically conscientious kind of havoc in the digital
space of photomontage. His trespass: a sculptor’s appropriation of photomontage to retrieve Germany’s historical memory from concealment
in a conspicuously a-historical post-war architecture. It is a triple trespass really, as successful as it is defiant. In six digital photomontages
mounted on aluminum plates, Spriggs re-constructs key sites in East Germany that were themselves re-constructed after the war. Spriggs’s
experience of the region during his studies at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, is translated in the work as a negotiation of the complex
relationship between history, memory and architecture. The legacies of the Bauhaus, German Dada and the architectural typologies of Bernd
and Hilla Becher, register uncanny traces in Spriggs’s work. But the ghosts that guide this project are more socio-cultural than art historical. Spriggs
teases a painful and repressed historical memory out of the re-constructed landscape of East Germany by returning now sound structures to the sites
of ruin that they conceal.
Archival photographs of the devastation left in the wake of the Allied bombing campaign in Dresden, serve as a reference in Zwinger, Dresden (2006)
and Stallhetes, Dresden (2006). The construction zones, seemingly cobbled together in the work, reveal traces of a system of haunting signifiers.
Most disturbing perhaps is the gigantic hole digitally added in the foreground of Buchenwald, Foremer Concentration Camp (2006). In addition to
unearthing the memory of reconstruction and evoking the destruction that preceded it, Spriggs produces a reflection on the (in)accuracy of memorial
imagery. His construction sites bear the mark of our machine-age culture of corporate developers and rigorous zoning regulation. They are not
peopled, as they were during the actual post-war reconstruction by the Trümmerfrauen; women enlisted to clear the ruins for re-building in the absence
of a male labour force lost to the war. These distortions of historical reality in Spriggs’s works render the sites as metaphors for the construction of
historical records, and as warnings against a misplaced faith in the veracity of such records…