Edition of three 46”x32” inches, Edition of five 23”x16” inches
These large Resemblagé pieces represent my newest creative directions for 2020 and 2021. Adam and Eve Covered In Razor Blades and Burning On The Inside were produced for a commissioned spread in Interview Magazine’s Spring 2020 issue. The other five pieces were produced for my Solo show with Unit London Gallery’s ‘Platform’ series, opening in January 2021. The model in Adam and Eve is Caroline Caldwell. All artistic Concepts fully developed and preliminary shots by Nobody and all final shots, seen here, were taken by Anna Yatskevich.
46”x32” inches edition of three, and 23”x16” inches edition of five
46”x32” inches edition of three, and 23”x16” inches edition of five
46”x32” inches edition of three, and 23”x16” inches edition of five
46”x32” inches edition of three, and 23”x16” inches edition of five
46”x32” inches edition of three, and 23”x16” inches edition of five
46”x32” inches edition of three, and 23”x16” inches edition of five
I created the word Resemblage (the combination of the words resemble and collage) to describe the type of art i’m making as the character David Nobody. These Prints represent the singular body of ephemeral and shapeshifting self portraits created on @davidhenrynobodyjr. As a virtual conciousness with No Body on Social Media, Mr Nobody defies the corporatized cookie-cutter versions of the vanity of ourselves. Resemblage is like an inside out person and shows the grotesque, cryptic and traumatized side of humanity hidden behind the masks of the everyday. He wears the excesses of consumerist society on his exterior self to expose and question society. He wears food to show how we live in waste and that we ourselves are essentially food for corporations. David Nobody’s immersion into this mental/emotional space of Resemblage stems from the still new medium of the internet, which gazes into us far more than we look into it (which is unprecedented) This new way of feeling is affecting how we see ourselves and each other through troubling and distorted political times. The work is as much a Sociological experiment as an expansion of what art can possibly become in the present and the future.
The Human Weeble Wobble is available for custom commissions, please email for inquiries!! I designed the first Human Weeble Wobble in 1995 in NYC for a performance art event called The Deviant Playground. Artists were asked to make interactive works of art and performance. Nobody was certain It would work and it was a bold and exciting experiment. As soon as i had fabricated it, i gave it a test and it rode beautifully!! I had the original Weeble in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, for years until it disappeared in 2003. It was fascinating to ride and i loved to let the audience play on it. In this sense, it is a sculpture that breaks the 4th wall unifying the audience and artwork into a creative whole. The audience takes care of the work, and each other, often teaching newcomers how to use it. The Weeble creates its own society with its own sense of governance.
I released footage of me riding the Weeble from 2001 onto instagram in 2016 and the video went viral. Since then i created a new Human Weeble Wobble, owned by two collectors, Nick Hugo Schmidt and his partner, in Bushwick, BK in the fall of 2017. Footage of the new Weeble went very viral on social media. The Weeble is available for events and i also fabricate them for sale. The sculpture was recently featured in a Vice video that covered an open to the public riding event and interviews with me the originator, at Superchief Gallery in Bushwick, in February of 2018.
Performance artist David Henry Jr. has finally brought his years-long project The Human Weeble Wobble to the masses after it went viral on social media. We followed him as he transported his giant two-ton creation to a warehouse-gallery space in Brooklyn as people got their chance to get wild and weird on the Weeble.
Pizza Infinity was a body of work that was developed while i was overseas on a residency in Basel, Switzerland for 6 months in 2007 after slowly befriending a local pizza restaurant across the street from a major museum, The Beyeler Foundation. The pizza place was the only spot to eat at night and i frequented it often. They had Picasso posters on the wall to loosely appeal to the museum crowd, and the establishment reminded me of my childhood pizza place in Pennsylvania where i grew up. i proposed an art show about Pizza to the owners and i fabricated and sight specifically installed a series of felt banners about Pizza as a consumerist religious icon. I moved to Berlin that summer and produced a solo show entitled Pizza Infinity at Brot Und Spiel, a young gallery in Berlin. i made a huge Last Supper With Pizza felt banner and a corresponding Last Supper table in the room, meant to mimic the image on the wall, I served Pizza and Beer and invited the audience to sit around the table. The Last Supper on the wall correlated with the people at the table in an odd and surreal manner. I Installed many other Pizza pieces as well.
I went on to produce many more Pizza banners and showed them at art fairs in Miami, New York and Puerto Rico. I Produced Pizza Infinity drawings and there were some performances also. The work was intentionally childlike in its aesthetic at times in order to probe the deeper meaning and feel in consumerist culture. i felt that pizza was a metaphor for the body. I was often combining figures and pizzas together in the compositions.
I Created a complete fashion line of DIY designs as a response to September 11, 2001 as an interventionist social sculpture. I intentionally sabotaged conservative clothing and appliquéd crashing Jet Planes onto men’s suits, and added distorted tailoring onto shirts and pants. I wanted the public to wear the images we feared as away to reconcile the reality we were living through at the time, and i wanted to sell this vision of wearable discontent to them. I had stores that sold my DHBJR designs and had fashion shows that were like performance art. DHBJR garnered press and became legitimate at the time. i lived in midst of this social sculpture in character as a punky fashion designer as work of performance art.
I made 3 Original Skins Of White Man in 2003. If you are interested, they currently are available for custom commission, email for details.
I took a job at Madame Tussauds Wax Museum for six months in order to stage a work of Immersive reality performance art in 2001, unknowingly on the eve of 9/11. I saw it as readymade theatre and set full of actors. Going undercover as regular guy from New Jersey, I worked as a Host wearing the required employee “jester” costume. My job was to be an entertainer and tour guide for guests. i was interested in the Wax Museum because not only was it really weird and creepy but also out an of ongoing interest in the dark side of Celebrity in American consumerist culture. The wax figures trace the relationship between fame and mortality as capitalist propaganda.
Inside the Wax Museum, the environment was hyper media saturated, The realistic Wax replicas projected a deathly unreality around them. often making it difficult to discern who was real and who was simulacra. I felt it was a perfect manifestation of Guy DeBord’s Society Of The Spectacle from 1967, i.e. that “mediated representations of social interaction replace actual social interaction, a complete commodification of the self.”
I wanted to place myself as working person inside this weird machinery and see how it affected my behavior. I began to more and more slip into character at work and often spent my shifts playing with guests and acting like a wax figure (which the hosts were often mistaken for) I snuck in Photographer Suzanne Wimmer to document my interactions with the guests and videographer Richard Sandler to shoot video and interview the public. Twenty Eight prints document the series, and the video Wax World gives a deeper look inside this world i inhabited.
I became super motivated at work and had the Corporate logo cast in silver which i wore as a necklace to work. Guests loved me so much that they wrote in glowing letters on my behalf to the management.
I showed Host in October 2001 as a solo show at Silverstein gallery in Chelsea.
Wax World video shot by Ricahrd Sandler
As an immersive work of performance art, I went undercover for one year at night posing as famed fashion designer Diane Vonfurstenberg's son, Alex. Using the name and a cheap vintage $20 suit "Alex" infiltrated hundreds of high profile celebrity parties in NYC in 1999 and 2000, meeting scores of luminaries such as Puff Daddy, Ivana Trump and even the President at the time, Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton. The wherabouts of the celebs were gleaned from public information; the Gossip pages of The New York Post and the Daily News. Sixty photographs make up the limited edition Vonfurstenberg Photo collection. All the photos were taken by handing a 35mm point and shoot camera to strangers in the vicinity, an homage to Duchamp’s ideas of chance operations.
The project became a national scandal in the media and was featured on Television, ABC’s 20/20, on the front page of The New York Observer and in tabloids such as The Globe, to name a few. It was my first New York solo show at Roebling Hall gallery In Williamsburg, Brooklyn in October of 2000.
I became obsessed with Trump’s image and stalked him for one year as a performance piece. Acting on information researched in the gossip pages of the New York Post and the Daily News to find Trumps public whereabouts I snuck into numerous VIP events in NYC. I trolled many a corporate function in search of the Don. For example: Trump was found at a fashion show after party one time and at a ribbon cutting ceremony for the live burial of illusionist David Blaine in another instance. Five photographs document their encounters.
When Trump went on to campaign for a potential Presidential run, I followed in hot pursuit. I campaigned on Trumps behalf by joining the Trump for President Exploratory committee in 1999. In midst of a great deal of uncertain publicity regarding Trump’s potential run at the time, chomping at the bit, I produced my own Trump for President 2000 poster. Armed with this Trump for President Sign and video artist Richard Sandler the two hit the streets and produced footage of the public’s opinion in the financial district of New York City.
As a member of Trump’s email list I was notified of a pro Trump rally at the Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City New Jersey. I hopped on a bus to AC where I shot The 8th Wonder video. At the Taj I met Trump again and had all five 8x10 photographs autographed in a gold paint marker. Trump upon seeing the images said “you must be a big Trump fan” which was replied “yes sir, the biggest”.
Donald Trump is the mack daddy of (patriarchal) public image. In 1998-1999 the Don was all over the media. In the gossip pages stories ran like “Irate golfer clubs 2 black swans to death on Trumps Margo-lake golf course in Florida”, another reads “Trump refuses to remove shoes at benefit in Buddhist temple in Manhattan. In another instance there were reports that prisoners in a jail next to Trumps golf course had been yelling obscenities at club members. Within Trumps curious obsession with image lurks a DaDa-esque absurdism. Trump in his lifestyle puts his foot in his mouth again and again almost in self ridicule. In sense he openly criticizes himself integrating this element into his public image. The project was an attempt through comparison of the self to Trump to examine the inner mentality of Caucasian males and in the end to ridicule that aspect in the self, the Trump within.
The project uncannily predicted Trumps presidential bid in 2016.
As an extension of stalking trump for a year as an undercover performance piece, I made the (probably) very first Trump For President 2000 sign in December of 1999 and took it to the streets of the financial district in NYC in January of 2000 to see if people would actually vote for him. Richard Sandler, the NYC Photographer recorded DV footage of my performance. That same day I encountered a live RATM video shoot/ live concert being directed by Michael Moore on the steps of the NYSE and ended up in the music video with my sign, now the stuff of internet conspiracy theory and legend: of predicting the future with my art.
Video covering my Stalking Trump project by Vice, released in the Fall of 2016
Standard and Poor (1995-1998) was the collaborative alias of David Henry Brown jr. and Dominic McGill. The name Standard and Poor is taken from Standard and Poor’s a company which rates the value of Fortune 500 corporations.
Standard and Poor created challenging media generated scenarios posed to the public as real so that the public could assimilate the presentation, and in doing so inform the process of creation in an unscripted, unselfconscious manner.
The scenarios were derived from capitalist myths popularized by the media and trickled down to the public via consumerism. Standard and Poor chose subjects purported to be real but which actually existed in a mental twilight zone between real and not.
S&P’s most notable project, Carpet Rollers Red Carpet Service was an actual company which literally rolled out the red carpet for $99 a roll. The “business” served as a “mask” for the performance art of S&P.
The Carpet Rollers rolled out the red carpet for a famous mystery clients at celebrity expectant locations such as Trump Tower and The Plaza Hotel in New York City. The red carpet functioned as a behavioral catalyst and also as a portable stage. A crowd gathers and grows and gossips amongst themselves waiting for some unknown star. The crowd is the focus of the scenario. The Carpet Rollers step back from the work allowing unselfconscious voices of the public attempt to put the puzzle together.
The endgame in mind was not only to document the reactions of the public but to create a failure in which no one shows up in order to turn members of the crowd into momentary social critics. These works have been likened to Waiting for Godot, a portrayal of life as being about waiting for something grandiose to happen when in actuality life was about the process of waiting in and of itself.
Standard and Poor is the bastard child of fine art, documentary and sociological process.
Here The Carpet Rollers intercept a posh event for the Queen of Spain, Egypt and Jordan and actually roll the carpet for the Royal threesome in the end.
