Spray paint and bismuth crystals on velvet

Ian Douglass

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Ian Douglass (b. Chicago, IL) is an artist and writer based in London, where he hosts the experimental Velvet Theory Podcast. “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. My primary subject matter is belief: how it is performed, produced, corrupted and covers up its own cracks. Probing painting’s origins as shadow, I question the reality of material, mining the mysterious chasms between form and void. 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 shambolic shadow of the sublime emerges from ephemeral materials, whispering unreality. Meanwhile, 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 and baroque, transmuting shadow into symbol, vivifying the void into kitsch, humor, and absurdity. The future can be attained through the ancient. The dust speaks in tongues.”