The Everyday as a Window into the Surprising
Organized by The Bridge Arts Foundation, the "Urban Pulse" Open Call Exhibition is now on view at The Scholart Selection Gallery in San Gabriel, California, running through February 22, 2025.
As part of the exhibition, The Bridge Arts Foundation’s Art Director, Tia Xu, sat down with several participating artists to discuss their creative process and artistic vision. In this interview, we are delighted to feature a conversation with artist David Larson.
—— Q&A ——
Tia Xu: Could you please share your background and what inspired you to pursue a career in art?
David Larson: I’m from the Chicago suburbs where I was lucky enough to get a solid introduction to art through surprisingly robust public school offerings. My interest in visual art went dormant once I was introduced to philosophy in college but, after a few degrees, I grew tired of crafting theoretical arguments for a specialized audience with little reach into larger cultural conversations. Finding an academic career unappealing and being a bit adrift, I started painting with no plan beyond enjoying completing projects on a scale of hours rather than years. These casual efforts gradually shifted as I found the visual medium better suited to exploring subtleties and conflicting meanings than academic theory. I also found that when audiences got to see my work, they were interested in engaging with the themes far more than I could manage through abstract reasoning. That’s why I’m drawn to working in the arts: an image leverages the initial appeal to a viewer’s unreflective instincts, only then to pull them into rich discussions of our shared experiences and efforts to create meaning.
Tia Xu: What does "Urban Pulse" mean to you, and how does your artwork explore this theme? Can you tell us the story behind your artwork from the exhibition?
David Larson, Reflecting, 2021, Alcohol ink marker, 10.50 x 13.50 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
David Larson: “Urban pulse” denotes, for me, the collective patterns of human movement coursing through the rigid infrastructure that makes dense population centers possible. I don’t want to overlook the individual, but I find the individual agent is surprisingly elusive. This is evident in my piece Reflecting, where a jogger pauses by a window display in the Upper East Side of New York. It is unclear if they glance at the display aimlessly while waiting for the traffic light, or if they are considering a purchase. Either way, from the viewer’s vantage point, their outline reflected in the window overlaps with a mannequin and the consumer is conflated with a product. Likewise, as the jogger gazes at the window, the viewer looks at the artwork: the sheer number of potential vantage points destabilizes the idea of the individual subject.
Tia Xu: What materials and techniques do you prefer to use in your art, and could you explain your choices?
Photo courtesy of the artist.
David Larson: My process starts by walking a city neighborhood with a DSLR and capturing the scenes that strike my eye. I have a few central themes that guide me, but I mostly rely on impulse and happenstance to capture moments of routine life. When culling through these pictures, I look for moments where the complexity and innate contradictions of contemporary urban life peaks through the mundane. For the artwork itself, I use alcohol ink markers as the gradual process of layering colors allows for both the subtly muted and the vibrant colors of an urban landscape. The medium provides several beneficial limits, including the ability to work with minimal studio space. The process of mixing colors to evoke the intricate visual details of a city street is also meticulous, which substantially limits the number of scenes that I can depict: a nice check against the proliferation of images facilitated by digital cameras. It also forces me to dwell with each scene long enough to uncover suggestions and implications that can be missed at first.
Tia Xu: Are there any artists or art movements that have had a significant influence on your work? If so, why?
Photo courtesy of the artist.
David Larson: Recently I have been drawn to the work of Kay Sage and Richard Estes. Though very different, their works share—to my eyes—an interest in landscapes as simultaneously personal and impersonal. Sage’s abstract landscapes seem to reify some ineffable inner feeling and, externalized, make that feeling accessible to explore as a visitor. Its deeply personal and yet it’s undeniably alien and other. I’m fascinated with Estes’ ability to frame city streets to create ambiguous visual riddles out of the mundane elements of urban life. In his urban landscapes where people are either absent or deemphasized, the surreal character of the built environment is revealed without losing sight of its beauty. Whenever I encounter their work, I can’t help but linger with them and pull at the varied narratives that emerge.
Tia Xu: What emotions or ideas do you hope viewers will take away from experiencing your artwork?
Photo courtesy of the artist.
David Larson: I want my work to spur reflection on how strange the environments that we build are: not bad, but certainly unexpected and enigmatic despite their familiarity. I paint particular locations and moments, but I tend to avoid the signifiers that distinguish specific cities as I want viewers to see recognizable places and connect them to the larger abstract global urban reality. There is a nostalgic element to my work—isolating a peaceful moment beside a record shop on a summer afternoon for example—that is intentional, but I don’t want it to overshadow the invitation to critically question the urban environment.
The Bridge Arts Foundation's "Urban Pulse" Open Call Exhibition Installation View, Photo: ©The Bridge Arts Foundation / Luna Hao
ABOUT OPEN CALL EXHIBITION PROGRAM
The Bridge Arts Foundation's "Urban Pulse" Open Call Exhibition Installation View, Photo: ©The Bridge Arts Foundation / Luna Hao
Bridge Arts Foundation's Open Call Exhibition Program is committed to supporting emerging artists by providing them with opportunities to showcase their work. "Urban Pulse" features 16 outstanding artists selected from over 100 submissions through a rigorous jury process involving art professionals. This exhibition runs from January 20th to February 22nd, 2025, at The Scholart Selection Gallery, offering a dynamic exploration of the energy, complexity, and human connections within urban spaces.
ABOUT ARTIST
David Larson
Raised in a Midwestern suburb, I settled in New England during a period of excessive educational pursuits. Working as a visual artist has been vital in recovering from long years of over-indulgence in abstract theory. My interest in how abstract ideas shape the social and material world in which they become embodied links these earlier explorations of academic theory with my current aesthetic interest in mundane urban landscapes.