Dustin Harris

I enjoy finding things people have discarded. Much of my process starts with objects, images or sounds found randomly or in route of roaming a city or rural landscape. I'm always surprised with how recycling can ignite the inspiration to recreate and help produce with new meaning. Starting with more distressed materials, helps to see a history and connecting to a past that provides direction to engage in making something fresh.

Some of my work deals with movement and the raw energy that living in a metropolis creates. I like to balance grounded rhythms and movements against contrasting abstract shapes, colors and sounds. In this experimentation my curiosity strives to find oppositional forces or dualities happening within urban environments as well as within the energy a group can create collectively. The materials may suggest ideas of what is happening somewhere else—a boy is running for the bus, a man is multi-tasking in his office cubicle, a teacher is helping a student to read, a factory worker is engaged in focusing. All of these experiences are happening at the same time, and often within a scenario of chaos, but when the day ends we all need to sleep to re-energize to push into another beginning. I feel gratitude and empathy for the daily struggle we all are involved in, and the drive to survive while trying to make things happen within a twenty-four hour cycle.

I generally find myself responding to a few different worlds of influence: abstract expressionism, pop surrealism, and graffiti art/culture. My history in street/public art (tagging, bombing, stenciling, wheat pasting, and sculpture splating), and my current creative pursuits (djing, collecting, music producing, surfing, and traveling) also push their way between the foregrounds and backgrounds of my art.