Overview
D. Billy's first solo exhibition, Sink Sank Sunk features a new series of graphical, mixed-media scenes -- some self-contained on panel or paper, and others creeping out onto the gallery walls -- combining drawing and painting with images and language culled from comic books, instruction manuals, product advertisements, and children's activity books, featuring characters plagued by miscommunication and bouts of cartoon violence.
According to D. Billy, "The construction of these works is very much in line with the approach to creative problem solving known as Synectics. Synectics essentially involves drawing connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and seeking new ways to subvert one's own traditional ways of thinking by applying personification and different types of analogies and metaphors. It involves the use of Play to float possibilities that seem absurd at the outset, and paying attention to what is called the "Hedonistic Response" -- the excitement that comes with hitting upon a valid intuition. That, more or less, is how each of these pictures was made. Rather than working from ideas and seeking the vessels to communicate them, I started with a lexicon of images, words, and mark-making methods, and arranged them in various permutations until some subconscious "eureka" moment occurred, and relationships began to emerge of their own accord. In Synectics, this is called the "Autonomy of Object" -- when the solution begins to take on a life of its own. "
"The three photographs in this exhibition, the first in a new body of work, document experiments in bringing these sensibilities into the material world. Using colorful media such as twisting balloons, party streamers, and artist tape, I have begun to add visual representations of sound effects to public spaces as a sort of dimensional graffiti. After embellishing the found scenes and photographing the results, I leave my additions in place to engage passers-by for as long as the materials hold up. For me, this process encourages a re-examination of surroundings and objects that are usually taken for granted, and injects a hint of the fantastical surreality that I have established in my other work. "
