I see myself framed by a kind of suburban biology. Just as we use our DNA structure as the predominant model with which we interpret ourselves, my work posits the hypothesis that perhaps the mundane habits and compulsions of our everyday lives also form a kind of map of the identity. Our habits line up like a series of markers; repeated they become the patterns that define part of who we are. These patterns and markers are framed, constructed and controlled within the architecture and environments, which we inhabit. Some of my own markers and the markers that are iconographic in our times run from the inhuman split-level to the incessant pastels of Martha Stewart. In these, I seek the science of the mundane, a tension between the generic and the highly personal.
I choose ceramics as one of my materials or means for its flexibility but also for its implied and intimate associations with our domestic and mundane lives. It is a material that speaks of hand work, and its role as a “second class” material brings with it perspective that is applied to contemporary art and the language of craft. My material interests are also extended to incorporate materials that further reference domesticity, suburbia and technology.
I see my work as the process of creating and describing systems. I seek out processes that reflect my cynicism towards notions of originality and instead pull from sources outside of art and outside of a personal aesthetic to create a kind of conglomeration and accumulation of information. These systems act out or reflect upon human functions, contradictions and absurdities.
Increasing in my work has been the ubiquitous and anonymous suburban house form. My hope is that this form becomes a kind of “Uber” image, suggesting something that contains all other narratives. The forms and cross fertilizations I create both reference a kind of personally driven diagrammatic language, as well as new languages of form that connect the macro and the micro, biochemistry and the ranch home. These connections search out new hypothetical links between biological models and structures, and the activities or systems of our everyday lives.
David East
