David Powell

My lifelong fascination with alternative bands and the cultural infrastructures that arise from their legacies has more or less defined my practice. The paintings and drawings I make refer to fandom and collective identification, they begin to make departures into the nature of spectatorship, the sharing of knowledge, the potential of art and poetry to encapsulate both the emotional and the political. Recent expansions in artistic research has enabled more focused attention on the phenomenon of underground bands becoming subjects for academic writers and theorists who are interested in writing about the cultural impact that certain bands became emblematic of. Social media groups are only now starting to share or provide links to articles normally limited to university websites and art institutions. Throughout my practice, a lo-fi immediacy is a common denominator that shifts the emphasis towards a material production that has at it’s core a collective social dynamics that strives to bring people together. The challenge of the contemporary exhibition format for me lies in exploring non hierarchical approaches to traditional mediums such as drawing and painting, in this sense I see my material production as a background to a sequence of programmed events. I’m interested in working with people from different culturally creative spheres with an emphasis on inclusivity around new forms of collaboration. This can be anything from staging events, inviting people to discussions/interviews, making zines, music/sound improvisation workshops that seek to challenge the separations between the curator and the artist, the writer and the theorist, the audience and the public and to enable new exchanges and reflections on music, literature and art.