Project No. 1: Your World

Art is anything you can get away with.

All media work us over completely. [… ] [T]hey leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.

- Marshall McLuhan

My name is David Philyaw. My passion in art revolves around the ability of the human form to blur the physical with the emotional, the artistic with the erotic, and the everyday with the magical.

As a fetish model, I believe in the empowerment of displaying your body as an avenue towards a radical sense of self-love and body-positivity. If artistry is about expression and emotion, then the human form is one of the most artist “mediums” one can create art with. Yet while depictions of the human form are nothing new in the art world, having a sense of pride in one’s own body is still an arguably taboo topic, albeit one that I intend to challenge in my work. After all, art should challenge the status quo. Art should not be universally palatable, nor should it necessarily be "liked." So long as art makes you feel, it remains art.

As a technical theatre major at Lawrence, the interplay between light and shadow is important to me. Dark theatre spaces remind us that light is not an inherent quality of any space, and that we as artists have the ability to chose where, how, or even if we incorporate light into our pieces. Indeed, a chisel is to the the creation of a sculpture as lights are to the presentation of that sculpture-- they both have the potential to bring out, dramatize, or even hide the original form.

Below are several items that help showcase these interests.

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