Artist Statment
The title comes from Horvitz’s artist book published after his work “Nostalgia” (2018–ongoing), which comprises the artist’s personal digital archive– made with various digital cameras since the early 2000s– of quotidian snapshots documenting his life. Each image was projected for one minute for the duration of the exhibition before being permanently erased. The title refers to Hollis Frampton’s film “Nostalgia” (1971).
The image-less book “Nostalgia” remembers these irrevocably deleted moments through pages containing the filenames and dates of the deleted photos, each with a description of what was once depicted. Horvitz evokes with the simplicity of these descriptions what he describes as a world “over-inundated and amassed with photographs (mostly digital) and with eroded attention spans,” choosing instead to hold on to the emotional remnants of an endless stream of images.
Bio
David Horvitz was born in Los Angeles, where he currently lives and works. He studied at the University of California and at the Waseda University in Tokyo. He obtained a MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, in 2010.Witty and poetic, the work of David Horvitz meddles with systems of language, time and networks.
Eschewing categorization, his expansive, nomadic body of work traverses the forms of photographs, artist books, performances, the Internet, mail art, sound, rubber stamps, gastronomy, and natural environments. His work examines questions of distance between places, people and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining or even erasing these distances. Using image, text and objects, his works circulate and operate independently of himself, penetrating ever more effectively the intimate sphere. When encountering his works– in the postal system, libraries, or the airport lost-and-found services– our attention to the infinitesimal, inherent loopholes and alternative logics, and the imaginary comes to the fore. Like lullabies impressed upon our minds, Horvitz deploys art as both objects of contemplation and as viral or systemic tools to affect change on a personal scale. Horvitz makes fictions that insert themselves surreptitiously into the real.