This Way: David Horvitz

Every two weeks throughout the summer, MIT List Visual Art Center will release a new artist-led experience. Each program consists of an audio file, and a PDF text. You are welcome to choose either to engage with—they will often be the same content, and are designed to offer different but comparable entry points, depending on whether you prefer to read or listen as you begin your experience or walk. An audio transcript can also be found below, and the PDF is screen-reader enabled.

For this edition of This Way, David Horvitz invites us to walk towards the ocean no matter whether it’s 1 or 1000 miles away. Horvitz shares an intimate story of his grandmother’s desire to see the Pacific Ocean again, inviting participants to reflect upon uprooting, movement, and longing.

About the Artist

Playful and poetic, the works of David Horvitz, an ocean romantic, based in Los Angeles, California, meddle with the systems of language, time and networks, hyper-paced Zoom calls, emails, and images transmitted through screens. Eschewing categorisation, his expansive nomadic body of work, traversing the forms of photographs, word of mouth and physical movement or distribution, artist books, performances, memes, mail art, sound, rubber stamps, gastronomy, weather, travel, walks, and watercolor, is presented through examining questions of distance between places, people and time in order to test the possibilities of appropriating, undermining or even erasing this distance. Harnessing image, text, object and flows which he mobilises to circulate and operate independently from himself, penetrate ever more effectively the intimate sphere. Left face to face with his works, in the postal system, libraries, and airport lost and found services, even engaged into action, our attention to the infinitesimal, finding loopholes and alternative logics within them, to the minute but important details and to the imaginary comes to the fore. As lullabies imprinted in our head, Horvitz deploys art as both object of contemplation and as viral or systemic tool to effect change on a personal scale. David Horvitz makes fictions that insert themselves surreptitiously into the real. Shifting seamlessly pebbles often possess a naturally frosted finish. 

This Way: David Horvitz