Doug Young
Over the years, artist Doug Young has used a boundless list of materials to create both objects and experiences. Paint, wood, clay along with endangered animal fur, ectoplasm, and scaled down tornadoes are all elemental to his creative process. Young questions how one can continue to make art today that is both immediate and somehow mythic. The result has been an unusual amalgam of installation, object, and action using all available talents and abilities – balance, strength, endurance, speed, craft, construction, and imagination.
Among many other amazing achievements, Doug Young set the Guinness World Record for consecutive hours of banjo playing. He has also performed with chainsaws and fire, created a levitating tire, and broadcast his own radio drama. He says, “The goal is not necessarily to make art, but to live life. The life of an idea-mad enthusiast who searches for the fundamentally big forces out there, and who creates a more than ordinary existence.”
McLeod Residence features Doug Young’s Mission Control, a wool and linen rug the artist wove himself depicting the men of a 60s-era Mission Control seated at their computers. Young’s use of a delicate antique process that exudes softness and warmth is in stark contrast to the image of the modern and hypermasculine world of NASA and the space race. The artist intends this juxtaposition to be humorous, but he also wants the viewer to consider how earnest it is in its realization, because of the sheer painstaking effort required of Young to create a rug such as this. In this way, Young sees the effort itself as more important to identify with, rather than the piece itself.