POSSESS

   David is a visual artist that incorporates current events, 3-D animation, cubism, printmaking, and laser etching into his work. He has used an interdisciplinary approach to his professional life since he received his B.F.A. in Sculpture (his interactive senior show was a collaboration with WILSON® where he upholstered furniture with tennis ball felt). Through an apprenticeship with a NYC installation artist Glen Seator (a Gagosian Artist) he has learned how art can be applied to practical skills such as carpentry, electrical work, and plumbing. Owner of "D+D Construction", since 2000, David has acquired multiple real estate properties along with skills in order to build, manage, restore, and design modern houses with 'green materials'. 

   In 2001 he co-founded the Asterisk (*) Gallery in Tremont (5 min from downtown Cleveland). Within his two years spent with the gallery he curated a ‘Jeff Chiplis’ show that got a feature write-up in "Art in America". In 2006, he trademarked and is the owner of "POSSESS®" a brand created for limited edition art prints, clothing, and handbags. David designed all parts of the company including, typography, graphics, patterns, and logos. Throughout 1998-2022 he has worked, full-time and part-time, on the computer trading stocks and options as a portfolio manager for a private investment company. Working with a professional database and trading platforms has shown David the critical advancements of the internet and software during this time period. His realization that over 70% of all trades made on the NYSE are now done by computers (or program trading) has influenced his decision to make people aware of this. 3D animation, from his hand drawn images, seemed to be the logical tool for relaying this and other current events to people. David was graduated from School of Visual Arts (NYC) in the spring of 2010 with an M.F.A. in Computer Art.

   Since 2010 he was accepted by the "New York Foundation for the Arts" to be a fiscally sponsored artist. From 2012-2015 David was asked to participate in IngenuityCleveland (which brings more than 10,000 people); a festival dedicated to the arts, music, science, and technology. He was asked repeatedly for interactive "smoke canons" that shot smoke rings 50 feet. They were made available to the public as well.  2014 IngenuityCleveland and NASA Glenn created a "Centaur Art Challenge" (which he one first place) to celebrate 50 years of the Centaur Rocket that helped man get to the moon and explore "outer space". The Great Lakes Science Center displayed David's 10ft. x 6ft. print in the lobby during the IngenuityCleveland Festival that year where once again he brought the "smoke ring canons". David has been making art through his active fiscal sponsorship at New York Foundation for the Arts while working on a private NFT/Ordinal project that will be released soon. For this private project he has secured 4 trademark classifications for the word POSSESS®, which he incorporates into his work and will be selling limited editions in the allocated goods and services. 

   It has come to my attention that the 4K monitors can have more appeal than paper. In my opinion this great progress of technology allows people to see thousands of “fine artist”, and there work, at the comfort of there homes. The digital format and hundreds of thousands of great artists online has in many cases proven to be more informative and pleasing to the eye than many gallery visits. The modern art world and modern artist has to take this into consideration while producing new work.

   That is why my approach to making digital art will start, not with pixels, but with my hand drawings. While studying “figure drawing” at Yale University(there for 1 year to study with Ronald Jones) I became very influenced by cubism. I studied everyone from the creators ʻPablo Picasso and Braqueʼ to modern cubists ʻElizabeth Murray and David Hockneyʼ.

   Drawing on paper these days is a tradition that will unfortunately lose popularity. However, I believe deriving cubist drawings from graphic images from popular culture (ex. Cubist 'Bob's Big Boy') will create an art form that will be my own. My belief is that the art making process should be moving forward only with the help and knowledge of the past. Current drawings or 20 year old ones I completed on paper will now come alive with the aid of modern technology.

The four major tools I use include ʻAdobeʼ software ʻIllustratorʼ, ʻAfterEffectsʼ, ʻPhotoshopʼ, and ’Substance 3D’. 

My take on HIGH-FREQUENCY TRADING on Wall Street and CRYPTO:

Trading in milliseconds is made available to overseas markets and billionaires by way of cable underwater…(for decades).

The content or theory of my pieces will be widespread, but one subject in particular that I will discuss is the present use of ʻSUPER Computers’ and software used by large Investor Banks and Cryptocurrency Trading Platforms. The stock marketʼs trading strategy of the past was based on buying stocks that have long-term value, solid management team, and good prospects. Today with the aide of software and ‘Artificial Intelligence’ we rely on investment companies that have “…robots trading millions of shares in six milliseconds.”

“The idea is straightforward: Computers take “real-time” share prices-and try to predict the next twitch in the stock market. Using an algorithmic formula, the computers can buy and sell stocks/crypto within fractions of seconds, with the bank or fund making a tiny profit on the blip of price change on each share”. It doesnʼt take a rocket scientist to do the math that a fund or bank has an insane advantage over the average American investor. Michael Mooreʼs quote from 2009 provides an insightful thought, “They take some of our best young adults, smartest kids, best mathematicians, best physicists, engineers and instead of having them do things to benefit our society and make the things we need, discover the cures we need cures for, instead they come here to concoct strange and exotic financial instruments….”

The technical names for this billion dollar “financial instrument” include: algorithmic trading, robo trading, black-box trading, quantitative trading, and high-frequency trading. This trust in established names such as Citigroup, Bank-of-America, Goldman Sachs, CoinBase; to name a few, have all relied on algorithmic or mechanical trading to produce record level bonuses for their top executives.