Formal Myths

Formal Myths brings together seven new works by sculptor David D'Ostilio. Created specifically for The Fitzgerald Gallery with generous support from the Arts Council of Rockland, these mixed-media, relief sculptures were constructed using recent technologies of 3D scanning, modelling, and printing and robotic milling combined with traditional, hand-finishing processes. This practice of combining new media and production methods with older modes of artistic production is a hallmark of D’Ostilio’s work.
Both art history and history broadly speaking play an important role in D’Ostilio’s practice, which bears traces of minimalism, Fluxus, and land art as well as Object Oriented Ontology--a philosophical movement that attempts to minimize the role of human experience and agency in the lives of things. Formal Myths combines the technological and the historical, the digital and the material, the virtual and the real, the animate and the inanimate into a visual mode of inquiry. The seven pieces on display here ask us to consider where one object ends and another begins; where the border between the digital and the real is located; and even what it means for something to be a part of history rather than the present.
The sculptures on display were created from 3D models of objects housed in other museums such as the Smithsonian and the British Museum. The models themselves were available freely on the internet, making it possible to create an exact replica of an object that is singular and historically significant. D’Ostillio’s work plays with the “found” nature of the models and the notion of the readymade. But once the replicas are produced in three dimensions they are manipulated and altered, making them, once again, unique works of art.
Formal Myths furthers this individuation through augmented reality: each work can be viewed using a smartphone that connects the object to a digital file thus allowing the viewer to manipulate the sculpture themselves. Standard dichotomies—the formal myths that make up art viewing and art history—collapse here. The works are both two and three
dimensional, the spectator is also the maker, history is present, and reality shimmers between the digital and material realms.