David Bayus, Blue Monster
January 19 - February 23, 2019

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Et al. etc. presents

David Bayus
Blue Monster
January 19 - February 23, 2019
Mission, San Francisco

Continuing his interest in gaming and film culture and how they normalize crisis, David Bayus has built an environment in a recurring state of cataclysm or an endless end-time. Looking to the apocalyptic landscape paintings of John Martin, the disaster films of Roland Emmerich, and the morphological hierarchies of Kaiju films, he imagines a volcanic island in the middle of an anonymous ocean. In this place, the arrival of crisis is not viewed as a specific event in time, but as a continual happening. 

This virtual landscape is inhabited by an ecology of abstracted lifeforms, existing in a permanent state of cosmic horror; a world that is perpetually without us. From our perspective, this environment reflects a perversion of natural form; a mutation, or an infection of the abnormal. If we accept the crisis-state as default, and the world is perpetually ending, we can begin to imagine how we could navigate in this space. 

In this exhibition, Bayus has created a series of paintings and sculptures depicting the various inhabitants of the island, along with a new short film, in which the viewer explores the cyclical procedures of revelation that make up the constituents of this oceanic habitat.

David Bayus (b. 1982, Johnson City, TN) lives and works in San Francisco, CA. He is co-founder of BASEMENT art collective located in San Francisco's Mission District. He received his MFA from The San Francisco Art Institute in 2010. He has exhibited work in the Bay Area at Et al., City Limits, Ever Gold, Alter Space, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Southern Exposure among others. Further afield, his work has been exhibited at Vacancy, Los Angeles; Field Contemporary, Vancouver; and at Material Art Fair;Mexico City. Editions of his work can be found in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. His work was featured in the 2018 edition of Bay Area Now at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.