Chris Dougnac

Lives and works in Miami, FL, USA

Artist statement

ARTIST STATEMENT CHRIS DOUGNAC (b. 1994) is a first-generation Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist living and working in Miami, FL. Through various media, Dougnac’s work questions the artist's role as image maker in contemporary society. Dougnac translates found objects and images into artifacts of altered histories, providing a conceptual scaffolding for narrative world-building. The “founding” of fictional organizations provides a vehicle for Dougnac to enact a subtle institutional critique highlighting the occult nature of the power structures of the contemporary art “world,” all while exploring their own lived experience as a first-generation Cuban-American. Reacting to the pedagogical and market trend of harvesting one’s trauma as a resource for art making, Dougnac adopts the semantics of conspiracy theories and science fiction to provide distance between the realized work and the artist’s personal dialogue. Dougnac employs art history and institutional convention as points of departure for performative interventions. Adopting the role of various institutional and blue-collar players alike, from painter to docent, curator to paranormal investigator, Dougnac excavates and obfuscates reality, creating their own. Inspired by a branded Manufacturers Hanover Corporate Challenge bandana, Dougnac imagines the Passed Lives’ Excessive Futures Foundation, a nomadic health cult supposedly founded in 1986. The Passed Lives’ Excessive Futures Foundation is a conceptual...

Artwork