Ian Douglass

Ian Douglass (b. Chicago, IL) is an artist and writer based in London, where he hosts the experimental Velvet Theory Podcast. His practice encompasses painting, drawing, writing, performance, installation and sound. “I work primarily in painting...

Ian Douglass (b. Chicago, IL) is an artist and writer based in London, where he hosts the experimental Velvet Theory Podcast. His practice encompasses painting, drawing, writing, performance, installation and sound. “I work primarily in painting and writing, sometimes spilling out into sound, installation, and performance. My practice lives in the space between theory and dream. A self-cannibalizing research process reverberates into momentary madness, seeping into the artifact. Paradoxes of authority and belief are my primary subject matter. Fragmented subjects loop into incomprehensible forms, underpinning my obsession with the uncanny: just when recognition presents itself, it slithers away. My recent bodies of work reference yet raze the history of painting, from velvet or copper substrates to religious iconography, Vanitas and abstraction. History collapses into hallucination as the shadow of the sublime is extracted from ephemeral materials that whisper their own unreality. Meanwhile, my material explorations solicit this theory/dream space, drawing out the hallucinatory from the real and underscoring the hidden life of the inanimate. My work in installation and sound focuses on inherent contradictions and convergences between cutting-edge technology and archaic rituals of summoning. In this sense, my work references but renegotiates legacies of the occult, wabi-sabi aesthetics, and minimalism reinfused with symbolic charge. The future can be attained through the ancient. The dust speaks in tongues.”