David Altmejd

It is in my faint relocation of my past that I remember a time where I was reading a lot of Henry Miller and Friedrich Nietzsche. In particular, these thinkers were assigned to me in university, so there was an openness and eagerness to my reading under the pretense of learning. When I think about that time of learning, I do remember an organization of chaos. Both men, in their own way, wrote about how we as people, but most importantly, artists, are able to inhale the mayhem of humanity and give us all a sense of contained emotion; something static that also has a pulse. That's if you really let yourself be moved by a work of art. Nietzsche said, "One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star." Miller, perhaps in response, wrote, "Chaos is the score upon which reality is written." I can only surmise from each man that art can function as an explanation of chaos, a personification of a vitalness to corral the wild into something coherent. It doesn't have to make total sense, but creation in itself is the act of trying to capture what it is to be human.

David Altmejd wants you to walk around that creation, to circle that feeling, both physically and metaphorically. The Montreal-born, LA-based sculpture artist makes works that are on the border of chaos and order, restraint and rawness, realism and fantasy. His sculptures are deep from his imagination, a form for which his inner self makes sense of its own chaotic impulses. He lets his mind wander, trying to remain uninhibited by a stream of consciousness, and ends up with sculptures you can touch, feel, dance around, talk to, imagine their own inner thoughts. In some ways, Altmejd is making art with its own mind.