▼
October 18th,2024 - March 1st, 2025
at The Power Station Annex

The here and there of things.

“I often describe my work as an event. It’s my way of describing the activity of art — a current.

Practice is the intellectual pursuit of that activity. Pursuing a current is like following a feeling. It has the urgency of a body and the temperament of a being. These consequences – body and being – have motivated my interest to locate the here and there of things. The search for herethere things is an attempt to offer an understanding of a where, a how, and a why – a happening. At times, I try to locate through recall. To recall is to witness. It’s my way of returning to the presence of the current. Also, at times, I return naively, expecting to meet the thing that has already happened.

Much of my practice is trying to determine how to engage. To engage is to acknowledge there is an already. I am not fulfilling my role as an artist by initiating an action, but rather agitating by way of intervention. I can alter a current, but I cannot create one. Making declarations is the only way I can speculate. Speculation gives me just enough distance to describe. If there is enough distance to describe, there is enough space to recall and enough awareness to witness. This call to attention is an inflection point in the process. Now this, then what?

Most of the material I am dealing with resides in the consequence of that observation, the then what? of the observation produces practice.

A floor, a wall, a screen, and an enclosure all produce possibility. The togethering of these parts becomes a simulation of space, encounter, and engagement.” — DTM

____

Devin T. Mays (b.1985, Detroit, MI) uses sculpture, installation, performance, and pictures for pleasure. He is an Assistant Professor in The Department of Art at Rice University. Mays currently lives and works between Galveston, and Houston, Texas.

Selected exhibitions and performances include Martin Janda, Vienna, Austria; The Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois; Neubauer Collegium, Chicago, Illinois; gta exhibitions, Zürich, Switzerland; Sweetwater, Berlin, Germany; F, Houston, Texas; SculptureCenter, New York, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois.