THE COINCIDENTAL SALVATION OF THE SURROGATE NIGHT MONUMENT – Danville Chadbourne

Artist Bio & Statement:
Danville Chadbourne (b.1949 Bryan, TX) is an American sculptor who works in a range of materials and formats, unified by a distinctive handling of forms and primal symbol imagery. BFA 1971 Sam Houston State University, MFA 1973 Texas Tech University. After teaching studio art and art history at the college level for 17 years at various institutions, Chadbourne quit teaching 1989 to devote himself full-time to his art. He has exhibited extensively at both state and national levels, including over 100 one-person exhibitions. His work is included in numerous private and public collections. Chadbourne’s work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, Ceramics Monthly and other publications, including The Art of Found Objects: Interviews with Texas Artists (Craig Bunch, Texas A&M Univ. Press, 2016), Surface Decoration: Finishing Techniques (Anderson Turner, American Ceramic Society, 2011) and Art at Our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers and Artists (Nan Cuba, Riley Robinson, Trinity University Press, 2008.) International residencies include ArtSpace India in Calcutta, India and Atelierhaus Hilmsen in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany. Chadbourne has been the recipient of the Dozier Travel Grant and, in 2019, was awarded the prestigious Individual Artist Support Grant from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. Primarily a sculptor in clay and wood, Chadbourne has created a complex body of work unified by a primal iconography and an artifact-like quality emerging from a very personal and consistent formal, aesthetic and philosophical sense. He has lived in San Antonio, Texas since 1979.

Primarily a sculptor in clay and wood, Chadbourne has created a complex body of work unified by a primal iconography. “My work is concerned with the evocation of spiritual or primal states. I use relatively simple sculptural images, sometimes static, like monuments, other times active, dynamic forms that suggest ritual usage. I use materials and processes that imply cultural attitudes that are harmonious with nature and the passage of time.” The overall effect is that of discovering an artifact that is evidently outside of our culture at one level, but reflects a kind of universal human consciousness, and the perception of our own personal existence. This anthropological quality emerges from a very personal and consistent formal, aesthetic and philosophical sense."

www.danvillechadbourne.com