Dav Bell
Dav Bell is an artist and independent arts organizer interested in collaborating with kind people to cultivate tangible and creative connections. Through encounter, relationship building, and humor, he sees art as a possibility for truth and reconciliation. He participates in gift-giving and is interested in how storytelling, lyricism, and craft can flourish in gift economies. He is committed to finding more ways we, as humans and other sentient beings, can thrive together. Prior to making a life in the arts, he worked as a firefighter for the US Forest Service and as a park ranger at the Upper Tampa Bay State Park in Florida. He studied visual art at Metáfora School of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, Spain, holds a BFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and an MFA in Environmental Art and Social Practice from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was the founder and director of the Los Angeles Artists’ Project Visitor Welcome Center and is co-founder and director of The Greenhouse Project, located in Santa Cruz, California.
Let’s Play (2023)
Created with Ante Bodlović
The older we get, the fewer chances, or less time we allow ourselves, to play with each other. “Staying in touch” takes the place of creating new memories.
Neon Ruins (2022)
i made a portrait of laub, the way i remember him the last time we were together, crammed shirtless with a bunch of stuff in the back of his car. he was about to fly to New Zealand, something like a vacation, but it was not going to happen, without his sunglasses which were missing, and we had to turn back. the trip was not happening otherwise, for him. it was simply a moment I understood, in a year(s) where little made sense.
Our Envisioned Futures (2021)
I have always loved memorabilia, an object one cherishes to remind them of a past time or person in a specific way. The emblem I sewed onto my square came from a sweater I wore the last year I worked as a firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service. The Captain I worked for was a massive man who bench pressed over three hundred pounds and weighed somewhere near the same. He was the type of guy who in the middle of responding to a traffic accident would tackle and fish hook me; or when I was suffering from extreme poison oak rash while battling one of the largest fires in California’s History, would sneak into my tent in the middle of the night and wake me up by tickling, rubbing and scratching my itchy blistering body. He called me Deep Ass, because I read a lot of books.
At the end of 2020, Visitor Welcome Center, the gallery I founded, closed after suffering major damage from a fire that erupted in the restaurant below. As I packed the last box of what remained at VWC, I came across this small piece of fabric that I saved for nearly two decades. The emblem on the patch reads “ Fire Siege ‘03. ” I remembered my captain telling me while we were on that fire: “You should be proud to be here because you will never see anything like this again in your entire lifetime.” It would be funny if it wasn’t so damn horrifying. In 2020, we saw a total of five fires larger than the Cedar Fire in 2003. I believe it is more important than ever for artists to translate and redirect our unique skills and capabilities to help, if not lead, in shaping an equitable future for all people by forming a mutual and regenerative relationship to the earth before it carries on without us.