Dave Greber

Dave Greber

Dave
Greber

b. 1982       STUDIO IN NEW ORLEANS, LA

Southern Region of USA
All day, every day, we are overwhelmed with images: scrolling feeds, digital touchscreens, glowing pixels. Multiple simultaneous voices continuously tweet and share and like, interrupting one another to find their way into our consciousness. Using a similarly tumultuous structure, Dave Greber’s video work co-opts the vocabulary of our commercialized digital world, using repetition, color, and discontinuity to disrupt our experience of time and space.
 
In the projected video Stilllives II: Vignette, we see a continuous loop of changing surfaces shown from above. A pair of hands unfurls a patterned blanket, then a mug drops and shatters, splashing its Technicolor contents across the screen. A bolt of fabric covers over the mess and the cycle starts afresh. The artist calls these works “moving paintings,” and we can see why. Yet the repetitive structure and obsession with surface point to the language of advertisements and social media. What might these works have to say about the way we interact with our world today?

One way I use video formally is as big moving paintings. With this work, I was thinking of Abstract Expressionist painting. I was making paint strokes with fabric and paint and other things that would make a color on a video screen.

Dave Greber