David Flaugher

David Flaugher
Snowman #5, 2020
Oil on linen
60 x 60 inches

I’m on a side job right now for a friend and sending from my phone, so for the sake of brevity I’ll be more direct about these works than I might normally. In 2010-2011, before attending grad school, (and obviously still in the midst of the recession) the only decent full-time job I could get was cleaning out foreclosed homes in Detroit and the surrounding metro-region.

Before getting this job, I had already started making biographical work about my family’s working-class roots and their pursuit of happiness through the hours of non-work, i.e. weekends, holidays, birthdays, shopping, etc. But my time spent cleaning out foreclosed homes completely reshaped my relationship to sculpture, space, and narrative. People left all of the stuff behind that wasn’t sensible to take with them, mostly peripheral objects used to house and protect other, more valuable objects. Be it hangers, jars, or storage bins, the median objects of a home became a focal point. Since they were mostly containers of one kind or another, they struck me as artifacts or metaphors of the vacant home in its entirety. These objects occupied empty domestic spaces in a moment of stillness before my coworkers and I threw them out. The whole process forced me to seriously reflect on things. Obviously, most artists consider an inanimate objects’ value re: market consciousness and institutional critique, but this occupation was extra poignant since my own parents faced foreclosure and cleaned out their retirement in order to keep our house. I would often come home from work and just look at all of the stuff piled up in our garage, literally for hours.

My experience with this job, and those objects, in those foreign yet familiar spaces, gleamed entirely of all of the content I had ever studied regarding art, poetry, philosophy, and film. Most notably how art is a marker of the time in which it is made. Whether consciously or not, projecting our identity onto our homes and objects seems indefinitely precarious to me now. They’re all signifiers of our own temporal state.