"WhitchBitch"

CPT - Center for Performance & Technology - Art Gallery - T103
Contact: Chris King
The art work of Susan David is on display now through Wednesday, Dec. 5, in the art gallery of the Center for Performance and Technology located on the campus of LSMSA.

David received her Master of Fine Arts degree in interdisciplinary studies at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, Vermont, in 2016 and her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2004.

In 2016, David received an ArtSpark Fellowship, an individual artist stipend fully funded by the Acadiana Center for the Arts and the Lafayette Economic Development Authority to implement her project titled “Project Rooster Teeth,” a community-funded public art grant based in Lafayette.

“Project Rooster Teeth” is a creative community voice designed to provide access for the public to experience and enjoy public art, while inspiring individuals and communities to give voice to other creative concerns through the intersection of art, activism, dialogue and awareness.

David is also the founder and steamroller of Freetown Studios, Inc., a non-profit artist run workspace located in a Lafayette warehouse among the unique and diverse neighborhoods of Freetown and Port-Rico in Lafayette Parish.

Freetown Studios promotes emerging, mid-career and established contemporary artists who work in printmaking, drawing, painting, installation, theater and other multi-media disciplines.
David has worked in many facets of the visual and performing arts world. From 2003-15 she worked as the set designer, an ensemble cast member and sometimes photographer for the Milena Theatre Group under the vision of Dayana Stetco, director. In 2012, she was nominated by Country Roads Magazine as an up-and-coming regional artist in Louisiana.

Her current show at the LSMSA Art Gallery is “WhitchBitch,” a reconstruction of the feminine. It plays with themes of language, violence, the symbolic nature of water, mysticism and religion, abjection and the uncanny.

“My artwork seeks to construct a form of visual language to re-construct the body and language through the desire to defamiliarize what is familiar in connection with my ideas concerning abjection of the feminine, social paralysis, phenomenology, grief, violence and destruction,” she said. “The broader context invokes ideas concerning subjective horror and spectacularized violence suggesting blind complicity to cultural apathy and social cruelty.

“My creative process takes on an interior outlook and the work is in dialogue with contemporary artists who also deal with the corporeality, psychology and therapy such as Berlinde De Bruyekere, Kiki Smith, Marc Quinn, Lygia Clark and Janine Antoni. These preoccupations come from my immersion in memory, history, my mindset as a printmaker, my interest in architecture and land, in the body and its uncanny limits.”

The art gallery is open from 12 to 4 p.m. daily or by appointment. For more information, email Chris King at cking@lsmsa.edu.
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