Gyscek '96 explores domestic life, technology in work exhibited at Cantor Art Gallery

David Gyscek ’96, studio arts coordinator in the visual arts department at Holy Cross, was photographing a male subject on his digital camera for a still photograph. When he went to review the images of the model mopping a floor they became animated.

“It sort of looked like a dance, and it was quirky,” he says.

With a bit of computer manipulation he was able to create a lively 7-minute video from the photographs of otherwise routine housework — and then rotated the whole thing counterclockwise at a 90 degree angle.

“I decided to orient the image on its side to throw the viewer off balance a little bit, which was an exaggeration of what was happening. It magnified the absurdity of it all,” he says.

Something was missing, though: a soundtrack. He turned to Mark Newton ’06, a musician, who was a studio art minor at Holy Cross, and asked him to produce music that was “quirky and whimsical.” Newton says he used a studio keyboard to create percussion and other background elements, and Pro Tools music software to master the sound.

“He sent me an MP3, and I loved it,” Gyscek says. “I remember watching it on my laptop and clapping — it was exactly what I was looking for.”

Appropriately enough, the video is titled “Wait, what?”

The video, along with other work by Gyscek, is included in Crossroads, a two-part exhibition of work by Holy Cross faculty and staff at the Cantor Art Gallery (through Dec. 19). Gyscek’s work consists of various media including paintings, illuminated photographs, an artist book, and video, and comes together to tell stories of domestic life and fetish. “I wanted to do a series of work that I describe as ‘eroticized domestic scenes’ — taking the mundane and turning it into a fetish,” he says.

On Nov. 19, from noon to 1 p.m., Gyscek will talk about his progression from a student at Holy Cross to a working artist. He will also display work that he created when he was a student at the College, where he majored in philosophy and minored in studio art.

After graduation, Gyscek lived in Asia for a year working in the Republic of Korea.  During this time, he traveled to Nepal and India where he studied the art of lost wax sculpture. He received a master of fine arts degree from Goldsmiths College, University of London, in 2000.

“David has been a model to Holy Cross students for a long time, in terms of the breadth of his interests and the deep intellectual reservoir into which he dips for sustenance and inspiration. He is a humanistic artist, always wondering about what it means to be alive and to live — and he embodies that humanism in his relationships with us all — faculty, staff, students. In that, too, he has never stopped being a model to our community,” says Joanna Ziegler, of the visual arts department, who was his professor for several classes.

Like the video, the three oil paintings in the exhibition also draw from his interpretation of technology.

“The idea for the paintings came from watching the iTunes visualizations on my computer. I photographed the computer screen and worked from that image, and made a painting,” he explains.

The colorful paintings are titled after the songs that were playing when he took the photographs: “Lucky Lisp” by Morrissey, “Leaving New York” by R.E.M., and “Analogue Roots” by Eric Pomeroy ’96.

“The conceptual thing that I think is interesting is that although they look abstract, they’re not; they’re coming from imagery. It’s imagery that I think people may not know where it comes from when they see it, but there’s something familiar about it,” he says.

Gyscek says he didn’t set out to work on this series to make a statement, but certain themes are recurring in the work.

“The images play into who I am and where I am in my life; reorient the viewer and get them to see things in different ways; and have just enough sex in them that they are provocative but not so much that someone will shut off to them,” he says.

“Some of the concerns that I was addressing when I was a student here are still concerns that I’m addressing now — this interest in the self, self-knowledge, and the figure, specifically the male figure,” he says. “The difference is that the work looks completely different. In my talk, I plan on walking the audience through my evolution.”

It’s an evolution that continues. Next semester, Gyscek will teach his first class at Holy Cross, New Approaches in Studio Art, which will draw on his background using different media.

Related Information:

* Press Release