Conversation 07: David Flaugher
This week’s Pressed Coffee Conversation—the 7th in the series—features Detroit-based artist David Flaugher. His experiences as a young adult during the 2008 recession and its effects have forged a multi-faceted and involved art practice that no few words can do justice to. While David shares many personal things about himself—from stories to sentiments—I found my own personal intricacies nestling within the common thread of his art and words, and it’s to be expected that any reader of our conversation may find their own arising. Home decorations and symbols of emptiness or change (such as moving bins), perfectly embody the dissonance that comes with the temporality of cherished things. In short, David’s years of labor in both craft and cleaning foreclosed homes offers to those who engage with his art a sort of sonder that we often overlook.
-Danielle
Installation shot of David Flaugher: Weekends and Holidays, solo exhibition at Lomex NY (2020)
Conversation with David Falugher (Transcript)
This conversation has been briefly edited
Danielle: So today is November 3rd, 2020, which I guess is a big day—it’s election day. Do you have anything eventful going on for election day?
David Flaugher: No, I’m just gonna go home and stay glued to social media and the television.
D: Yeah, probably. I still haven’t looked at anything—anything at all about the election, other than people’s stories telling everyone to go vote.
DF: Yeah me either, I’ve been at work all day, but Clare has been glued to polls and stuff everyday for the last several weeks, so… She just keeps me in the loop. And then when I have time I double check stuff.
D: That’s kinda how Cameron is for me for news in general these days especially because I just don’t have time for much.
So other than the election, I guess we’re here to talk about your art and your art practice! So you’re an artist whose work touches on—and I made myself a brief list of what comes to mind— touches on economic hardship, looming impermanence, moments of constructed bliss, I’d say, especially familial moments. And also environments and space, things that one can own to fill up their space. Is there anything else you’d add to that, about your work?
DF: There’re a lot of things I could add. They all kind of branch off into different trajectories. I don’t know, as far as keywords or the headline, I’ve always had a problem—because I’m super attention deficit—I’ve always had a problem with trying to distill stuff to just a couple of these keywords. Which is super academic—I mean it’s really useful, but the kind of “elevator pitch” of work, the “I make work on this or that.” For instance, to tell someone “I made this painting or sculpture based on impermanence” which is almost too big of a concept…
D: It’s too broad
DF: Yeah, so, I could have those words if I really needed them, but that’s kinda the whole point of the stuff I’ve been making lately, is that it’s almost like a decorative prop or decoy. Because like the personal or cryptic content takes a lot longer, so all those things listed, when I think of them as just time based, even though I have made stuff with video or audio or newer technologies, I don’t think a painting or sculpture has to be any less of a time based medium than those other, more conventional time-based medias. So with something like, I think you said something like impending impermanence?
D: Yeah, looming impermanence
DF: The kind of intrinsic impermanence of all things.
D: Exactly.
DF: Which is almost like too poetic or something, too crafted to try to tell somebody, if it’s just me and I try to tell them about my work. Like it’s fine for someone else to use those phrases, but I’d rather just show them the snowman, or the bunny, which is a double agent because it has this quick almost mindless acceptance to it if it’s cute enough or familiar enough. But if you were to spend time with it, it would reveal itself.
D: You mean like a real animal bunny?
DF: No like a painting.
D: Ooh okay, I was like, wow I don’t know bunnies like that.
DF: I guess it’s just a different way of entering the conversation. I’ve never really felt comfortable, you know, like when I’m trying to type artist statements for a grant or application or something. I can do it, but it never really felt natural to me or my own voice to be like, “the work is about emptiness, or impermanence,” or this or that. So I’ve been doing a lot of these short stories that are kind of metaphors for those things, instead of those things. So It’s like more of the actual thing just spread out into a story instead of saying, “it is about this key term.”
D: Right and I had this “list” so that I could at least give an idea of what your art seems like from an outsider’s perspective for our conversation. But going back to stories, you have a lot of stories that touch on your past and your experiences. I’m curious, where did you grow up?
DF: I grew up on 8 mile.
D: In Detroit?
DF: On the Ferndale side. Like I could walk to the State Fairgrounds.
D: Oh so you’re really close to here.
DF: Then in like elementary school, beginning of middle school, I moved to Clinton Township.
D: What do your parents do?
DF: My moms a nurse and my dads a carpenter.
D: I ask because in a lot of your writings for your exhibitions, there's a lot of, as you say, stories. You share moments of your house getting close to foreclosure, and you having working class roots. Can you describe then—and I know you were just talking about how you feel about having to describe—but rather than just your art, your research interests and how your experiences have informed what you’ve become curious about.
DF: It’s not that I hate describing, I love describing, it just gets really long winded and that’s kinda part of the problem, which is actually a segue into how I became more involved—it’s not really an interest, it kind of is now because it’s not necessarily the same experience that was ten or twelves years ago. At the time I was literally involved in cleaning out foreclosed homes, that was the only job I could find at the time besides a minimum wage McDonalds job. I wanted to try to make just a little bit more than that, which was still brutal. Even trying to find something for $10 an hour wasn’t really gonna cut it, but you could kinda live.
So this job was $9 an hour, it was cash, and it was through a friend I had gone through undergrad with. His family owned a business that cleaned out foreclosed homes. I did that for the year before I left for grad school. I didn’t realize how serious, or how close to foreclosure my family’s experience was till a little later. When I started the job, I knew we were working class or kinda broke, but it’s hard to quantify that as a kid or even as a young adult. The older I was getting, the more vocal my parents were with me about it. When it’s that bad in a house, you just see things that you can’t hide from the kids forever, because there’s a lot of stress associated with that.
Installation shot of solo exhibition at And Now Dallas (2018)
There’s just a lot of nuance to the situation, for me living inside it then you go to work and you go into an empty house, and there’s stuff in the house. It’s kind of like a time capsule—or not like a time capsule, but like a freeze frame or stage for the nuance and intricacy to unfold. It’s only something that can unfold over a lifetime, or many years, like you’re building a home, and it’s full of memories. When I come in as a stranger, it’s a narrative that I could never know all the details about. When I come in as an employee and it’s people’s stuff and you don’t know what kind of people. For the vast majority of the time you could have absolutely no idea what type of people they were. Maybe the only exception is one time I knew I was in a Korean household because there were still kimchi jars that they had handmade in the garage. Otherwise, the only kind of common denominator is but not just working class—a lot of these were actually in nice subdivisions, the families were just sold on homes they couldn’t afford. So still even if they were making six figures, they were still in a precarious situation. And the foreclosure place will just put that in their face.
D: They’re still victims.
DF: At first when I started to grapple with this stuff, and I didn’t have the fluency I was looking for until a lot later, to feel more confident and open about talking about them and working with it, because it felt so personal, and so I was really guarded for a long time. In the beginning, I just thought of it as a private-public dynamic, and what people know publicly, or even in a familial sense. It doesn't have to be public like on social media, it could just be in the household or amongst their extended family, what’s out in the open vs. what’s happening privately in the house.
D: Especially when you talk about how when you were a child and you didn’t know a lot of what your parents were going through. Even in that sense, what’s going on just between two people in a however-many-person household, there are hidden nuances that, actually, are hidden by a lot of the type of objects that you bring up in your artwork, like the decorations and the objects that are used to fill space and create moments that give people opportunity to live outside of that.
DF: Yeah, it had a lot to do with that. It was also an immediate and cheap way to address temporality.
D: As in the objects?
DF: Yeah because they are seasonal, so it comes and goes. It is ritualistic, and that’s really important to me in terms of how I see my family engage with decorating their house. I’m just personally less interested in the ritualistic aspect as I am the temporality or the impermanence.
D: I think the temporality is interesting too because when you think about it, Christmas time is not cheap. The holidays are not cheap. There are families that have to save up all year just to be able to have a good thanksgiving dinner, or to think about giving their kids a nice Christmas. And so that is the build up of having to get there and then it being a fleeting moment of a few days where the family is together for the holiday.
DF: It took a while to figure out which specific decorations I was drawn to and I’m still working through a lot of them. In the beginning I knew I was gonna use Christmas lights, that one was pretty explicit, but then after that I was like, okay, am I gonna keep using decorations? Or am I gonna do something else? The short answer is that it’s both, sometimes I use them and sometimes I don’t. I wanted something that is cheap and easily recognizable so it could have a similar dynamic where a person, a stranger, could have an association with the thing. But then there’s also this much longer content, depending how invested they wanna get. Or an educated viewer might read it differently. If that makes sense.
Painting of a Snowman, by David Flaugher. Photo from his recent solo exhibition at And Now (2020)
D: That does make sense, I think that a lot of artworks are at risk of being over-interpreted or just interpreted wrong. A lot of times when I look at your art, specifically the paintings of the snowman, I get a lot of different feelings of nostalgia, but also, being an adult now and one that has to plan my own Christmases, I like those paintings a lot because some of them look like holiday cards that I get, or even gift bags with a giant, blown-up snowman face on them.
Have you ever taken something from your parents’ home or your childhood home and brought it into your art, or?
DF: I tried. In the beginning there was more stuff that I used. I made a piece with my dad’s old work coat, and I brought a cheap, fake painting from my family’s cottage to the studio a couple months ago and it never worked out. I’ve tried. If they’re here at all, they usually sit as inspiration, and only if it’s completely not being used, ever, because I love the way that they decorate and everything. I just take a ton of pictures, literally thousands of pictures, at all of my family’s places. And I take them of when the stuff is set up. My mom goes really hard with decorating in that kind of way, especially for Christmas, it’s above and beyond. Halloween too, she did a lot. I just take a ton of pictures when they're up, and then I actually take really a lot of pictures in the garage, when the decorations are taken down, just for my own reference.
D: You use objects a lot, but you still use paintings, too, and people don’t just have paintings of snowmen around but it’s the icon of the snowman in the first place that brings a lot of associations for people to connect with it.
So we’re out of time, but I wanted to touch on real quickly: you mentioned that when you’re going through thinking about what to do next, I know that there’s always a “next,” there’s always something to be thinking about in the future. You have, I saw, your exhibition coming up in the summer at the Broad Museum in Lansing, so that’s pretty exciting. Are you thinking about continuing, or are you testing anything new for that?
DF: Yeah, it’s sort of new, it’s something I have been working through for a couple years actually—
D: You don’t have to spoil it, but—
DF: It’s a specific type of sculpture that I’m mostly focusing on flushing out, and then a couple other things that are similar to what I did in the last two solo shows. But I feel like each show is a response to the last one and what I thought I could have done better or what I liked about the last. You know, just editing and moving things around in this kind of way. It’ll be a response to the two shows I had in 2020.
D: Thank you so much for talking to me, I’m sorry we’re out of time already—it always goes by really fast.
End.
Installation shot of David Flaugher: Weekends and Holidays, solo exhibition at Lomex NY (2020)
David Flaugher received his BFA from the College for Creative Studies in 2008, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2010, and received his MFA from New York University in 2013. Exhibitions featuring his work have received write ups in Sculpture Magazine, Flash Art, and The New York Times. His work has been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art Warsaw (Warsaw, PL), Power Station (Dallas, TX), Gladstone Gallery (New York, NY), Goethe Institute (Minneapolis, MN) This year, solo exhibitions featuring his work include LOMEX (New York, NY), And Now (Dallas, TX), and at The Eli and Edyth Broad Art Museum (Lansing, MI). He currently resides in Detroit, MI, where he teaches drawing at the College for Creative Studies, Henry Ford College, and the University of Michigan.
If you would like to make an anonymous comment or correction, please fill out this Google form. Note that these comments and corrections may be shared with the readership. Comments, corrections, and inquiries may also be directed to noxlibrary@gmail.com
