Born in Mexico in 1974 sculptor Jose Dávila lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico. Trained as an architect, Dávila explores issues of form and content via large-scale installations, each unique composition of varying linear dimensions, paradoxical alignments and pictorial configurations.
The site-specific work for Dallas Contemporary resembles the artist’s studio in Guadalajara. Dávila makes use of the museum’s open floor plan, industrial concrete foundation and high ceilings as part of his creative process. Using locally sourced materials from Dallas-area quarries, the artist will create balancing and stacked site-specific sculptures composed of steel I-beams, cables, large boulders and objects.
Museum visitors will stand beneath typically hidden structural details and experience Dávila’s visual negotiation of materials through the carefully placed, and seemingly precarious suspension of objects--a metaphor for the constant struggle of opposing forces; a representation of the friction between modernity’s tendency to homogenize and humanity’s need for diversity. The erratic, freestanding structures defy the formal order and repetition commonly associated with modernity and minimalism. Displayed in their natural state of oxidation, the angled lines of color and stacked I-Beams and rocks disrupt the clean precision of the modernist grid.
This exhibition is curated by Dallas Contemporary Adjunct Curator Pedro Alonzo.