︎ Davewalshstudio@gmail.com
Dave Walsh is a painter who lives and works in Philadelphia. His work investigates the facilitation of American landscapes mythologies through infrastructrue and architecture. He received his B.F.A from Tyler School of Art and his M.F.A from Yale School of Art. He was a 2105-16 Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Education
2015 M.F.A. Painting, Yale School of Art New Haven, Connecticut
2010 B.F.A. Painting and Drawing, Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Awards
2023 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant
2021 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant
2018 F. Lammot Belin Grant, Waverly Community House, Waverly, PA
2017 First Place, 215/610 Contemporary, Code Switch, Juried by Odili Odita
2015 The Barry Schactman Scholarship, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2010 Painting Faculty Award, Tyler School of Art
Residencies
2015-16 Fellowship at Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA
2014 Princes Drawing School Residency, Dumfries House, East Ayrshire, Scotland
Solo Exhibitions
2023 Afterburn, Peep Projects, Philadelphia, PA
2022 Stereograph, Taymour Grahne Projects, Online Solo
2021 Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2019 Dave Walsh, Small Works Gallery, Waverly Community House, Waverly, PA
2016 Dave Walsh, School House Gallery, Provincetown, MA
2016 Apprehension, Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown, MA
Selected Exhibitions
2023 Pull, Ruffed Grouse Gallery, Narrowsburg, NY
2019 Dave Walsh & Cody Mack, AFA Gallery, Scranton, PA
2019 Landmarks, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
2019 Faculty Exhibit, Villanova University, Villanova, PA
2019 Terra not so Firma, Fjord Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
2018 Nostalgia of Land, Little Berlin, Philadelphia, PA
2018 Big Link, Standard Projects, Hortonville, WI curated by Kate Mothes
2018 77th Woodmere Annual, Woodmere Art Museum, Chestnut Hill, PA
2018 What Time is This Place? Community Arts, Phoenixville, PA
2017 215/610 Contemporary, Code Switch, Gallery at Delaware County
Community College, Media, Pennsylvania- Juried by Odili Donald Odita
2017 Baker's Dozen, Little Berlin, Philadelphia, PA
2016 Prompts and Wonders of the Everyday, Center for Emerging Artists,
Philadelphia, PA, Curated by Hitomi Iwasaki
2016 Fellows Exhibition, Provincetown Art Association Museum, Provincetown, MA
2015 Yale Painting and Printmaking 2015, Garis & Hahn, New York, NY
2015 2015, But Whose Counting? Thesis Show, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
2013 In Front of Strangers, I Sing: 72nd Annual Juried Exhibition
Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA, Juried by Dona Nelson
Publications
2015 New American Paintings #117, The Open Studios Press, Editor’s Choice
Selected Teaching
2016-2024 Adjunct Assistant Professor, Tyler School of Art and Architecture
2021-2024 Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of the Arts
2022-2023 Adjunct Assistant Professor, Swarthmore College
2017-2022 Adjunct Professor, Villanova University
Acknowledging the history of fiction in landscape painting, my paintings announce their own fiction, a system of shifting perspective, flat skewed planes of color, and illogical moments. I translate my position of not knowing but feeling my way through these problems, their histories, and contradictions with sensitivity and nuance.
Reckoning with this tradition began after studying painting at Tyler School of Art, when I hiked the entirety of the Appalachian Trail, a 2,100-mile footpath from Georgia to Maine, in 2011. I saw a preoccupation with viewing the landscape preserved in a language of rustic frontier aesthetics. This five-month experience laid the foundation for analyzing landscape mythologies and my participation in them as the crux of my artistic practice.
The myth of white men discovering themselves through nature is one I intimately know from my youth camping and backpacking. The power of the white imperialist gaze and its obsession with conquering, summiting, and wilderness are fundamental frontier myths. My paintings undermine the power of that gaze to find a form more capable of knowing and living with the land.
The focus of my practice is large paintings ranging from five to ten feet wide. This scale responds to the monumental landscape tradition in the United States established by artists like Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church. Their paintings omitted Indigenous Peoples and the systematic violence perpetrated on them. Landscape painting contributed to the wilderness myth by denying Indigenous peoples' existence in order to justify expansion and resource extraction.
My process of making paintings involves travel and research. It begins with fieldwork in national parks and recreation areas, where I collect memories, photographs and drawings. In the studio, I then contextualize these references with primary and secondary sources, including archival documents, imagery and literature that allow me to investigate the construction of a specific place-myth.
What is at stake in my work, then, is no less than deconstructing the ideology of power, place, masculinity, and whiteness within the history of the United States. Landscape has been too often overlooked as an agent which naturalizes mythologies of power and ecological destruction. My paintings trouble these historical frameworks so we can begin to develop a deeper and darker ecological perspective of our world. My work is one part of this greater struggle, searching for and developing new forms to undermine the language of landscape representation as an innocuous pictorial strategy and to find newer and healthier ways of looking at the world.
Peep is proud to present Afterburn: a catalog printed on the occasion of Dave Walsh’s solo exhibition at Peep Projects. The catalog features high quality images of all paintings shown in the exhibition paired alongside a thoughtful conversation between Kati Gegenheimer and Dave Walsh exploring themes of the American Frontier mythos, the history of landscape painting, and Walsh’s personal qualms with both when creating this specific body of work and in his overall practice. This limited edition catalog is selling for $15.
https://peepprojects.org/store/p/afterburn-catalog