Michael Davies - Dark Gadgets

Michael Davies, from a very early age was an intuitive creative, and has made art, his life’s passion. The artist’s Mother, a musician and piano teacher, was always very interested in the arts. After noticing that Michael was greatly intrigued by art and illustration, she gifted the then twelve-year old a large book featuring the works of the master of surrealism, Salvador Dalí'. This introduction to the world of fine art set him on an artistic journey that would prove to be lifelong.

Michael has always been a creative intuitive, largely self taught. Taking the time and effort to learn new media by creating many works with new methods and materials. This has been, and continues to be his artistic education, in addition to his years of academic studies. Michael has explored many forms and techniques of artistic media including: Sculpture (constructionist and subtractive), acrylic painting, colored pencil, linoleum block printing, airbrush, and mural work. Michael’s favorite subject matter is portraiture, both human and animal in all his diverse media, including sculpture.

Michael’s most recent body of work is mechanized, moving sculpture made of found objects, he calls, ‘Dark Gadgets’. The term "found object" is a literal translation from the French objet trouvé, meaning objects or products with non-art functions that are placed into an art framework using the technique of bricolage, and the sum of the parts become a final assembled work of intent, as art.

Michael’s ‘Dark Gadgets’ line of mixed media steampunk sculptures, are created from objet trouvé, materials, mechanics and fasteners. The reduction and repurposing of the original objects and the alteration and conversion of them into works of art makes these works bricolage. Michael as bricoleur, and his artistic assemblages of objet trouvé, cast-offs or other discarded materials take their place in the canon of art history.

Bricolage the assembled construction of objet trouvé for their combined aesthetic qualities dates back to at least the 16th century, when the collections of aficionados were displayed in private "cabinets of curiosities" But it wasn't until the 1900s that artists began to incorporate objet trouvé into sculptural works as an artistic gesture of intent.

Some of Michael’s sculpted works are a mélange of organic, metallic, electronic and man-made materials. With his keen, creative eye and boundless imagination Michael distills this assortment of objet trouvé into a curious incorporation of complexity. Michael, with the mindset of an artful, Machiavellian MacGyver, prompts the objet trouvé in bricolage to exhaust their singular characteristic, and are assimilated into the metamorphosis of the new work.

When viewer’s contemplate Michael’s work, Salvador Dalí' and the the Surrealists influence comes to mind. The Surrealists, informed by pure imagination, believed in the power of dreams and their intuitive association with objects of automatic creative production. The merging of the unconscious imagination and physical building gives Michael’s sculpted assemblages an added level of intellect, that affords us, an admiring wink and a smile at our discovery of something wholly creative.