IT’S ALL IN THE DETAILS
David Altmejd’s “The Island”, 2011
David Altmejd is a sculptor who is fascinated with the extraordinary potential of the object, and convinced that the act of making can generate meaning. Altmejd fashions intricate sculptural environments that call to mind miniature stage sets, museum dioramas, architectural models, and reliquaries.
There is no planned narrative to his work, this is something that is cultivated during the process of creating and changes over time during the art’s existence. David Altmejd studied biology before asserting himself as an artist and his biology background is a core to his work whether it’s the overall creatures and figures he creates or the cumulated systems you find running through his sculptures. Everything he makes has a certain energy running throughout.
In 2000, Altmejd began to sculpt isolated heads and other body parts of werewolves or bodies that have elements that resemble the werewolf. Indebted less to B movies than to nineteenth-century gothic tales like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), these works extend his interest in sculptural energy, referencing the entropy implicit in the mythical transformation from human to beast. Furthermore, the werewolf symbolizes a host of classic oppositions—human and animal, good and evil, life and death, beauty and abjection—all of which the artist embraces but refuses to resolve.
While Altmejd’s oeuvre examines the dark underbelly of the human imagination, beyond the haunting gore and monstrosity lies profound hopefulness. Out of death and decomposition, signified by the werewolf’s ubiquitous presence, emanate life and regeneration. “I see my installations as organisms,” the artist has said. “I start making something but at a certain point it starts making choices by itself.”
