Graduate Program in Visual Arts, Department of Visual Art & Art History
David Scott Armstrong
Associate Professor
Print Media

E darmstro@yorku.ca
W Personal Website
EDUCATION
BFA (Alberta), MFA (Western Ontario)AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Print Media (intaglio, relief, screenprinting)Photo-based Print processes (copper photogravure, photopolymer gravure, photo-lithography)
Digital Printing processes
Alternative Photo/Print processes (Cyanotype, Vandyke printing)
Artist Books and Folios
Drawing (series/process-based)
Materiality and Metaphor
BIOGRAPHY
David Scott Armstrong is a print artist interested in the entwining of things, natural phenomena, and the act of looking. He explores qualities of perceptual and material threshold by folding together elements of printmaking, photography, and process-based serial drawing. His prints, drawings and bookworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally, in solo and group/juried exhibitions in Canada, the US, Estonia, Russia, Japan and Brazil. In 2008 he co-edited and wrote for a special issue of the journal Visible Language titled “After the Grave: Language and Materiality in Contemporary Art”. His current studio research explores the convergence of historical and contemporary print media processes, specifically 19th-century photogravure techniques and digital imaging, where he is interested in the relation between image and matter.
Teaching interests at the undergraduate level include both hand-generated and photo/digital print media techniques, emphasizing the relation between looking and making, and the compositional poetics of the image as both material and metaphor. He supervises graduate students across all studio disciplines (painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, video) at the MFA and PhD level.
Across each of these studio disciplines and levels of study, he encourages his students to engage in their work with head, heart and hand. He believes that “to make something is to engage in something both of the self and other than, outside, the self. Making is a collaborative act of care, craft and desire, a kind of knowledge that approaches the humility of love: a more intimate form of knowing the world.”
Professor Armstrong joined the faculty in York’s Department of Visual Art and Art History in 2003.
Graduate Program in Visual Arts, Visual Art & Art History
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