David Flaugher

I’m on a side job right now for a friend and sending from my phone, so for the sake of brevity I’ll be more direct about these works than I might normally. In 2010-2011, before attending grad school, (and obviously still in the midst of the recession) the only decent full-time job I could get was cleaning out foreclosed homes in Detroit.

People left all of the stuff behind that wasn’t sensible to take with them, mostly peripheral objects used to house and protect other, more valuable objects. Hangers, jars, and storage bins. Since they were mostly containers of one kind or another, they appeared to me like artifacts or like metaphors for the vacant home in its entirety. These things occupied empty domestic spaces in a moment of stillness before my coworkers and I threw them out. Obviously most artists consider an inanimate objects’ value, but this occupation was extra poignant since my own parents faced foreclosure and cleaned out their retirement in order to keep our house. I would often come home from work and just look at all of the stuff piled up in our garage, literally for hours.

I had already started making biographical work about my family’s working-class roots and their pursuit of happiness through the hours of non-work, i.e. weekends, holidays, birthdays, shopping, etc. My time spent cleaning out houses completely reshaped my relationship to sculpture.

My experience with that job, and those forsaken objects, in those foreign yet familiar spaces, eclipsed everything I’ve ever studied regarding art. Art is of course a marker of the time in which it was made. But, whether consciously or not, projecting our identity into our objects and homes seems indefinitely precarious to me now.

- David Flaugher, January 2020

David Flaugher currently resides in Detroit, MI, where he teaches drawing at the College for Creative Studies, Henry Ford College, and the University of Michigan. Forthcoming solo exhibitions include a presentation at The Eli and Edyth Broad Art Museum (Lansing, MI) and at And Now (Dallas, TX).