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IcerocketBing Davis is a contemporary artist who uses "found" objects to create beautiful works with ties to varying African peoples culture and art. This video was made for an installation of Bing Davis' artwork at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Bing Davis talks of his work, his past and his passions.
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And so I found that art not only is wonderful as a personal expression, but it's an ideal way to understand self and understand others.
Bing's show is a great example of a show in which an artist has taken parts of their culture and their personal lives and their surroundings
and their community and built it in as part of his work and as part of his thought process.
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In my exhibits and how I make my art, it's inviting for the average person because they see ordinary everyday things, just used in a different way
and so it's a little bit demystifies and takes away that fear of looking and then they begin to see how one person utilizes that common material.
I think what appeals to the average person is the use of familiar objects, and he turns them from being very familiar objects into something that looks like it's a part of a traditional African work of art.
All these kinds of rituals that were part of my past and part of many peoples past, can be picked up indirectly or felt when it's assembled in such a way.
This Portable Shrine in Homage to the Middle Passage is really about me giving honor and praise to my ancestors,
but also to those who did not make it to the new world and by my presence here that I know someone made it,
I don't know who it was but someone made it.
What I want the viewers to feel is something beyond the ordinary. I'd want them to stop, pause, reflect and then that reflection,
hopefully, give honor and praise to those who went before and those on whose shoulders they stand.
So, as people stand there, they may say I remember Rosa Parks, I remember Martin Luther King, I remember Malcolm X, whoever they want to recall, I remember grandma.
I think that with Bing his interest in addressing multiple ages and his interest in addressing people with varying amounts of art experience
or understanding about art, that whole sense of teaching and being a part of people's lives, making art a part of their lives, is sort of contagious.
And so it has been a whole journey of love and involvement in something that I just feel forcibly to be involved with and that's creativity and artistic expression.
So, it has followed me all along the way, and I just made that commitment in 5th grade...I don't know what else I am going to do, but I am going to make art.
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