SIGNIFICANT WORK – David De Boer

Significant Work culminates into a precareer retrospective for Los Angeles based artist David De Boer. Including works created between 2012 and 2013 from Michael Cavendish’s collection of contemporary art, the exhibition explores De Boer’s trajectory thus far, and in conversation with nullspace, a curatorial team of artists and curators, and cocurator Staci Bu Shea, who are using their influence on the exhibition as a platform to communicate with De Boer’s work and the audience. It features a survey of installations, video and stills, and other related ephemera that confront mundanity, authorship, institutionalization, and value in art.
De Boer believes that the most relevant questions for him regard “how audiences participate in contesting and authorizing meaning and what this means for viewers.” His practice is functioning at its most successful level if it is being embraced by the audience. For a moment, there’s an opportunity to forget that De Boer, or any of this, actually exists, because he is creating “the opportunity to get lost in the creation of context, and get lost in the element of process.”
Within the gallery space, it is here where we can perform with the work and have a say in what it suggests. De Boer blurs the line between artistic and curatorial practices, as does nullspace, to encourage the audience to consider when one role becomes the other. It’s the authorial, sleight of hand: nullspace will use De Boer’s work from Cavendish’s collection as support material for this recontextualization of De Boer’s work within the exhibition space.
A panel discussion with the artist will be held on Thursday, December 12, 2012 at 6:30 pm at FSCJ’s Kent Campus.
The opening reception will take place on December 13, 2012 from 6:30 to 10 pm at Florida Mining Gallery.
A limited quantity of prints will be for sale during the reception and through the duration of the exhibition.
Florida Mining Gallery is located at 5300 Shad Road, Jacksonville, FL 32257. Gallery Hours are Monday – Friday 10-5 or by appointment.