David Iselin-Ricketts

“Before/After: A Onesie Experience is totally “generic” it could be shown/performed anywhere. I hope that none the less it will develop (from a “necessary” distance) interesting connectivities and tensions with the broad (but actually rather specific?) thematic of displacement forcing its actuality/embodiment, focusing and framing it into the the tautological abstraction of a total(ly defined) art work, a messy tautologically that undermines itself by its own insistence, and leaves it hallowed out and open to projections. The work literally creates an “internal displacement” of exhibition visitors within the work itself, as well as within the exhibition as a whole. The staging of these “before” and “after” (the displacement?) photographies points to the nonrepresentational of the “in between”.

Before/After: A Onesie Experience is about how how a collectivity, or shared identity can be created by very arbitrary means and how this process can (not) be represented. I’m interested here in tensions between the organic and the contingent in the constitution of a groups. On a level that the work doesn’t necessarily make explicit I’m thinking about something like “urban affection” or “pop-culture universalism” as fields of belonging not based on shared origins, religion, history; that is affects of universality which do not really on transcendental humanist values.

The Onesie’s worn for the “experience” belong to a contemporary pop-cultural casual/party wear fashion trend (from 2014), but the jumpsuit/one piece is obviously traditionally know as the uniform for babies, prisoners, workers, and fighter pilots.”

“David Iselin-Ricketts was born in 1987 in Keene NH, USA and raised in New England and California. He graduated from the University of Arts Berlin in 2014. He lives and works as a visual artist in Berlin(since 2010). He also works a bit as a care giver in a nursing home and teaches drawing to middle and high school students.

For lack of a more precise concept it could be said that David works in the field of diagrammatical Installation, that he tries to creates art works which converge and disperse body/time/space images and ambiances. Content wise his interests lie in the production/constitution of the contemporary political imaginary, with a special focus on the culture and problems of “puberty” (that which is not(yet) / < a subject, not (yet) / < political)."