Performance artist and sculptor David Henry Brown Jr, who hilariously refers to himself as a “negative influencer”, has created “Resemblage”, a surreal series of self-portraits created by his character David Henry Nobody Jr that don’t reveal his face in any way. Instead, the artist finds really creative ways to specifically hide his face in a plethora of bizarre objects including Spam, toy cars, toy frogs, mannequin hands, a vacuum cleaner hose with pizza, donuts and mushrooms, just to name a few.
Resemblage is like an inside out person and shows the grotesque, cryptic and traumatized side of humanity hidden behind the masks of the everyday. He wears the excesses of consumerist society on his exterior self to expose and question society. He wears food to show how we live in waste and that we ourselves are essentially food for corporations. David Nobody’s immersion into this mental/emotional space of Resemblage stems from the still new medium of the internet, which gazes into us far more than we look into it (which is unprecedented) This new way of feeling is affecting how we see ourselves and each other through troubling and distorted political times.
David Henry Nobody Jr’s solo show “Fake Smears and Facial Fiascos” opens at Contra Galleries in New York City on January 31, 2019.