About

David DiMichele’s series Pseudodocumentation depicts imaginary art installations in monumental exhibition spaces. These pseudo-documents, which are actually photographs of small models in the artist’s studio, playfully engage scale and perception, while blurring the lines between fact and fiction, and questioning how we experience art. DiMichele’s work addresses the role of photography in documenting temporary installations; most people experience these artworks through photographs rather than first-hand. His constructed spectacles are homages to the grand ideas of artists like Richard Serra, Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson. “The works deal with issues of abstraction, conventions of documenting art, and the ideology of the gallery space,” DiMichele says. His rich, dream-like images draw the viewer in, to imagine oneself in the exhibition hall, but the settings are not altogether inviting. Dramatically shot from an omniscient perspective, the dwarfed figures are overwhelmed, suggesting that the idea of art is perhaps, unsettlingly, larger than life.

David DiMichele studied art at the University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Santa Cruz; and California State University, Long Beach. In 2008 he was awarded the prestigious City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship. His solo projects have been exhibited in New York and Los Angeles, and he has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Kohler Arts Center, Wisconsin; the Laguna Art Museum; the Haggerty Art Museum, Milwaukee; Irvine Fine Art Center; and the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, among others.