We are thrilled to announce that Karen David will be Artist in Resident in the BA Painting studios at Wimbledon College of Arts this spring.

“In 2014 I took a research trip to Texas and New Mexico to visit the studios of Donald Judd and Georgia O’Keeffe and to experience this desert wilderness or ‘mythic space’ where artists gravitate to and conspiracy theories and hidden-test-sites ferment. Similarly, Suburbia is a place where myths and stories simmer in the undergrowth. One can imagine X-Files’ FBI Agent Fox Mulder re-watching Bigfoot footage while updating a logbook or corkboard with speculative sightings. Mulder – the original ‘punk in the suburbs’ in search for the truth.”

Karen is currently working on a series of abstract paintings where, as a methodological tool, each painting is titled chronologically after an episode from the 1990s TV series The X-Files, starting with the first; Pilot, through to the last; The Truth. She will set up the studio as a station from which to conduct her own painting investigations and ‘search for the truth’, providing a flip from atelier to underground investigator in equal terms.

Karen David (b.1976) is a London-based artist and writer interested in mutability of values and aesthetics from multiple hierarchies appropriated in cultural consumerism. By engaging with the act of painting through the keyhole of post-painterly abstraction and the eyes of the hobbyist or craft artist, paintings made utilising tie-dye techniques hover in this contested territory of hierarchical aesthetics.

This residency in Painting forms part of our year long examination of Punk in the Suburbs.

More on Karen David

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