
Visual Art & Art History
David Scott Armstrong
Print MediaAssociate Professor
darmstro@yorku.ca
Education
BFA (Alberta), MFA (Western Ontario)
Biography
David Scott Armstrong is a visual artist interested in the entwining of things, natural phenomena, and the act of looking. Early experiences on his grandparent’s farm in south-west Saskatchewan and his later University studies, taught by Tim Lilburn, Liz Ingram, Walter Jule, Lyndal Osborne, were foundational.
As an artist he is attentive to materiality and metaphor— the way things are in themselves and the way things resonate with other things. The constraints of art, and in particular image-making, are expressive of eros— what he calls “a desire, to see and be with, which opens the eyes.”
His prints and folios, drawings and bookworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group/juried exhibitions in Canada, the US, Estonia, Portugal, Russia, Japan, Korea and Brazil.
Teaching at the undergraduate level has focused in print media, a medium which he celebrates as having “a widening circumference with no fixed centre.” What is print? he asks. Its identity is more like a kind of non-identity. And this is good. Print is otherwise, a hybrid medium of evolving combinations: hand—machine—art—design—drawing—markmaking—photo—digital—book—sheet—image—text—object—the one—the many—. In the Department of Visual Art and Art History he supervises graduate students across all studio disciplines at the MFA and PhD level. Beyond his home department he has worked with graduate students in the Department of Design, and the Graduate Programme in Interdisciplinary Studies (with thesis projects spanning literature, cinema, animation, music and cognitive studies).
Professor Armstrong joined the faculty in York’s Department of Visual Art and Art History in 2003.