­DAVIN WATNE

 

 

Artist Statement

My work visualizes a change in how we perceive our current era. I begin by culling public imagery and personal photography to build digital collages that serve as references. I then use the slow, meditative process of oil painting to discover the possibilities revealed between the image reference and its final form.

I imagine the moment immediately following a collision between humans and the non-human world to depict our entangled fates. These stark and cinematic images use roads as metaphors for the Anthropocene, where the progress of technology creates a violent separation from other species. These roads are the literal tools of expansion through wild spaces that link physical trauma to the systemic trauma of colonialism. Within my paintings, I alter these outcomes, deciding who survives and who escapes domination.

Beyond physical collision, I am driven to paint a spectrum broader than what our eyes naturally perceive. By inverting landscapes to their color opposites, I signal environmental degradation, bringing unseen pollution to the surface through chromatic intensity and 'uncomfortable' beauty. Using oil painting to execute this alternate vision allows me to embrace and subvert the medium’s traditions of grand landscape painting, historical and colonial framing. By using techniques akin to master landscape painters of the early American expansion like the Hudson River School painters, I adopt the accepted visual language for depicting natural spaces to reveal the unacceptable realities of environmental damage. Where those historical painters sought the sublime in America’s untapped wilderness, I am illuminating the tapped and extracted landscape to help the view mourn the sublime tragedy.

 

Bio

Davin Watne is a multidisciplinary artist exploring in the dissipation of power, authority, and conflict. Using mediums imbued with an array of histories, traditions, and commercial applications, Watne visually communicates ideas and images that run counter to the prevailing modes of signification.

Watne is a recipient of the Charlotte Street Foundation Award, ArtsKC Inspiration Grant, Avenue of Arts Municipal Arts Grant, Art in the Loop Public Arts Grant, and the UMKC Funding For Excellence Award. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums including, Haw Contemporary, Arte Laguna Prize at the Venice Arsenale, CICA Museum in South Korea, Site: Brooklyn Gallery, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art. He has participated in residencies at Arts, Letters and Numbers, Wassaic Project, Vermont Studio Center and ArteSumap in Colombia, South America. Watne’s work is featured in many private and public collections such as the Mary Barton Cohen and the Oppenheimer collection, at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.

He has spoken about his work at venues such as Fairmont State University, Western State Colorado University, Maryland Institute College of Art, University of Minnesota, Emporia State University, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, and Airey Knoll Arts Organization.

Watne received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1994 and his MFA at Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013. He is a father of three and an Associate Professor at University of Missouri Kansas City, where he teaches Studio Art Foundations and is the head curator and director of the UMKC Gallery of Art.