David Michael Butler

David Michael-Strickland Butler ( Born 1983, St. Louis. MO) makes paintings, drawings, installations, and films. By demonstrating the omnipresent lingering of a ‘dominant culture’, Butler touches various overlapping themes and strategies. Several reoccurring subject matters can be recognized, such as the relation with popular culture and media, social justice, working with repetition, provocation and the investigation of the process of expectations.

His paintings often refers to social issues, pop and mass culture. Using painted, written and drawn symbols, a world where light-heartedness rules and where rules are undermined is created. By using popular themes such as social justice, sexuality, family structure, and violence, his works references issues of privilege, as well as the avant-garde as a form of resistance against the logic of Race, Privilege, and Capitalism.

His works demonstrate how tells a story about the intersections of race, identity, and equality. It challenges the binaries we continually reconstruct between Self and Other, constantly striving to breathe questions through the spaces between social constructs. His hope is to hope is to create work that it is used to challenge the status quo, and provoke dialogue. With the use of appropriated materials which are borrowed from a day-to-day context, he presents everyday objects as well as references to texts, paintings, media, and hip-hop culture. These honest images are juxtaposed with trivial and evocative objects. He creates situations in which everyday objects are altered or detached from their natural function. By applying specific combinations and certain manipulations, different functions and/or contexts are created. Some have said, his art is a loud bang and shoulder shake, to wake up and question what’s fallen as ordinary. His work is his voice, and he just wants to tell the story. David currently lives and works in Columbus, OH.