Ian Van D.
October 21 - November 25, 2020
“the warehouse
is the memory
of who I was
when everything
changed”
Bio:
Ian Van D. constantly skated in the church parking lot by his house during COVID. Regularly, he’d talk to his mother, father, and brother on the phone when he couldn’t think of what to do next. On long days, he’d sit on the curb and think of sculptures to make out of material he had scavenged earlier. During COVID he ate a lot of spam and became fascinated by period pieces, like Easy Rider and The Town That Dreaded Sundown. The rest of the time, he made art in a warehouse he titled, “The Bloodshed”.
About the show:
COVID arrived and everything stopped. It just fucking haulted, just like that. I felt alone like never before, like a lot of us. With the loneliness, I felt this panic to find somewhere, anywhere to do my work. I was able to find artistic refuge in a warehouse space owned by my colleagues’ father. He made an agreement with Derek and I to use the space for our art practices while navigating the pandemic. The warehouse space was like nothing I’d seen before; scaffolding, cabinets of tools, screws, bricks, old wood, and space, lots of space. I set up a cot atop of the scaffolding where I would eat freezer pizza, take naps, and draw anything, literally anything, just to get something going. School closed, so work closed. And then no one could see anyone, and everyone was scared which somehow made everything more lonely. So I would work. Just constantly. Collecting items from the streets, like TVs, buckets, wooden skids, I began to see a vocabulary develop. As it became more clear that things would never be the same, my work became grounded in the reaction to my day to day life. I faced cabin fever, I watched the digital memorial service after my uncle passed, and I found somewhere to put my angst. I put it through the screens of televisions, nailed it to broken skids, and painted it on the faces of moldy boxes. In my labor I offer the memory of who I was when everything changed. I pursue the question of who we are in the objects we throw away. I give you the vocabulary I used to find my purpose once COVID changed everything.