About
Brooklyn artist Doug Young questions everything.
He is currently directing his inquisitiveness to our relationship with nature—a place of refuge, exploration, and exploitation. Young’s new paintings propose museums as microsystems of both curiosity and corrupt expansionism, focusing on how nature is often in service to society.
Doug Young’s works explore tensions between the natural and manmade world in a manner that is dystopian yet hopeful. Employing the technique of reverse painting on glass, Young creates a visual experience that uses illusion and wonder as an antithesis to oppressive systems that devalue individual labor and personal expression.
Along with reverse painting on glass, Young works in traditionally recognized folk art mediums of woodworking and rug hooking. He engages with labor-intensive crafts that celebrate the material over the cerebral and its egalitarian approach to art making. Young is a student of American popular culture, and the folk arts offer him a means to speak to the spirit of America’s rich creative past while using imagery and iconography that address our urban and technological present.
In 2001 Doug Young was awarded the Guinness Book World Record for the longest nonstop banjo performance in history—24 hours total.
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