Meet one of our senior Studio Art majors, Quinn Massengill!
Quinn is a Studio Art/English double major. While he started his English major very early on in his Davidson College career, Quinn’s passion for art evolved later, during his sophomore year. At the time, Quinn was writing stories, but also practicing figure drawing. His drawings allowed him to connect the worlds of literature and visual art, and to fall in love with the art-making process. From then on, Quinn’s art-making practice became his full-time focus. In the beginning, Quinn delved into work with two-dimensional media, creating paintings and drawings, and using canvas, wood, paper and all sorts of other materials to explore the topic of queerness. The artist explains that to him, “queerness” is “not just sexuality and gender, but also the strange weirdness that makes us uncomfortable—anything that might pose a threat to the binary system.” Quinn is interested in the dichotomy between queerness and the normate, and explores this dichotomy through figures that succeed while queer. Although he creates environments of queer belonging, Quinn’s figures are caught in a dilemma: belonging and not belonging, all at once.
Quinn’s newer work explores similar questions of rejection and belonging, but has transitioned to three-dimensional media. During Quinn’s exhibition, you will see bundles of wood—these sticks of all shapes and sizes are clustered together in order to investigate the idea of queerness and the queering of objects. Quinn came to this idea through his studies in English and an investigation into the word “faggot,” which originally referred to a bundle of wood and has since become a derogatory term for a queer man. Quinn uses this double meaning to reclaim the word and to question what “faggot” means. When thinking back on the idea of rejection and belonging, Quinn sees these sculptures as humorous, rather than lamentable. “They kind of create their own world,” Quinn says. The process of making one of the wood sculptures involves scavenging for materials around Davidson, breaking the sticks apart, and combining them once more. In the process, the sticks are queered, painted, broken, bound, and re-formed.
Quinn’s experience with creating an exhibition has helped guide him toward a focused goal. He says, “I kept wandering and wondering and experimenting and exploring….but if I only did that, I wouldn’t have arrived at a space like this exhibition…it was something to strive toward. I would make art anyway, but the exhibition allowed me to have a path to guide me—to not get too lost”. When asked about how he remedies a period of creative block, Quinn replied that the solution depends upon the problem. If he is exhausted from overproduction, Quinn finds that taking a break and working on something else is helpful. If it’s the opposite, and he has been away from his art-making practice for too long, Quinn finds it useful to go back to things that have been influential, from other artists’ work to old works he is proud of—anything that inspires him and reminds him that he is a capable artist. Quinn’s advice to other artists is to work every day, even if that means a simple 10-15 minute sketch. Although he hasn’t been able to do this lately since he is working on putting his portfolio together, creating and experiencing art daily has been very important to Quinn.
Quinn continues to make art and to focus on building an artistic career for himself following graduation. After Davidson, his first goal is to attend a Post-Baccalaureate program abroad to strengthen his body of work before he pursues MFA programs in the United States. He says, “Art-making is the thing I want to pursue in my life however possible.” Whether through teaching, mentoring, or working in the art industry, Quinn is committed to staying involved in the art world and to continuing his artistic practice. When asked what he is looking forward to most about his exhibition, Quinn replied that he is excited for the opportunity to share his art, which is so personal, and to allow the community to connect to it.
Quinn’s exhibition will take place in the Smith Gallery at Davidson College from March 14-20, with an opening reception on Thursday, March 14th from 10:45am-12:15pm.