If not noir there's something rather gris about my good friend David Schoffman.
He's a lurker, a shiftless flâneur, a peregrinating urban nomad who's more comfortable shivering on a dark street corner than he is watching Netflix with his arm around his latest girlfriend, sipping pinot noir and drifting into a honied catnap.
People unfamiliar with Los Angeles picture a place where the streets are an empty cathedral of clumsy city planning and where the car rules like a coughing, wheezing, four-wheeled potentate.
And while it's true that the honk and hiss of constant exhaust perfumes the air with the fine particles of a slow death there's also an exuberant pedestrian culture if only you know where to find it.
Schoffman loves that part of L.A. and it informs his work in unexpected ways.
The barkers and street prophets, the dealers and skaters, the workers and drifters, the moms without bus fare and the dawdling teenagers looking for something a little less than trouble, the scavengers getting by on cans and plastic, the exercise freaks white-wired like science projects in bright, skin-tight velour, the nodding dope fiends leaning like old lumber in darkened doorways, tourists on i-phones wandering like ghosts. These are the people that clutter David's dreams and his new sculptures are a record of his quests.
The critics think he's lost his mind and perhaps he has but he's true to his vision and the love he feels for his unlovable city is genuine and touching.
The barkers and street prophets, the dealers and skaters, the workers and drifters, the moms without bus fare and the dawdling teenagers looking for something a little less than trouble, the scavengers getting by on cans and plastic, the exercise freaks white-wired like science projects in bright, skin-tight velour, the nodding dope fiends leaning like old lumber in darkened doorways, tourists on i-phones wandering like ghosts. These are the people that clutter David's dreams and his new sculptures are a record of his quests.
The critics think he's lost his mind and perhaps he has but he's true to his vision and the love he feels for his unlovable city is genuine and touching.
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