Overview
Marc D'Estout is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator, art director and designer who graduated with a MFA from San Jose State University. His extensive career includes exhibiting at numerous galleries throughout California and the United States, being featured in several art and design publications, and keeping an active art and teaching career.
His art is, at first glance, seemingly simplistic. But take a closer look and you'll see there's much more to it - relationships between his work and ordinary objects, social commentary, and occasional dark humor. His art is carefully crafted from sheet metal or found items, transforming basic or used materials into unique art objects. The Triton Museum of Art is exhibiting a collection of the artist's work from the past 20 years, including various size individual sculptures and wall-mounted works.
There are rumors that Marc D’Estout was born in an aircraft hanger somewhere in southern California. It is fact however, that he holds an MFA degree from San Jose State University, and is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator, art director and designer.
D’Estout is a Silicon Valley Creates Grant recipient and has also been awarded a Rydell Fellowship in Santa Cruz County. His work is currently represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in San Francisco, and he has exhibited at numerous venues including: San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery; Aqua Miami, University of Hawai’i Art Gallery; Red Gallery at Savannah College of Art and Design; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft; SFMOMA Artist’s Gallery; Palo Alto Art Center; Tercera Gallery, Palo Alto, California; San Jose Museum of Art; de Saisset Museum, Santa Clara University; Richmond Art Center, California; Bedford Gallery/Dean Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek; San Jose ICA; NUMU, Los Gatos, and the Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz—as well as furniture and design galleries such and LIMN and Coup d’Etat in San Francisco and Gallery of Functional Art in Santa Monica.
D’Estout’s pieces have been published in several art and design magazines, newspapers, books and catalogs. He is a featured artist in the Juxtapoz’ Car Culture book, and his work was used for the cover image and featured in the significant Graphis book Products by Design. The Thompson Gallery at San Jose State University produced a 48-page monograph chronicling 2-1/2 decades of Marc D’Estout’s art and design work.
In addition to his 3D studio work, D’Estout has maintained an active design and teaching career. He most recently held the position of curator for the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco. For 10 years he served as Director for Art and Design for UCSC Extension. Prior to that he held positions as contemporary art curator and exhibit designer for both the Monterey Museum of Art and the Triton Museum of Art. He has also taught a variety of art and design courses at San Jose State University, Santa Clara University, various community colleges in the Bay Area, and Anderson Ranch in Colorado. D’Estout has also served as a juror and guest curator for numerous galleries and arts organizations throughout California.
Artist Statement:
Although I am now primarily an object maker, my formative art career was rooted in conceptualism and installation work that actively engaged viewers in carefully created environments.
I think of my current pieces as sculptural haikus–formalist reductions. I experiment with subliminal (or sometimes blatant) imagery in response to observations of social and cultural memes, personal (mis)communication, politics, or pop (sometimes dark) humor.
I usually draw my pieces first… sometimes as sketches, more often as precise guides. Most of my work is created from flat sheet-steel... the thickness of car bodies. Some pieces include steel rods. Shaped parts are created by hammering the metal into a sandbag or, sometimes, over curved metal blocks called stakes. The parts are then joined by welding and finished by filing and sanding seams, often to give the illusion of a single form. Surfaces are finished with either paints or patina. Other works repurpose and alter found objects… sometimes with new handmade components. These pieces often have a more immediate gestation.
While concept drives my imagery, I am equally obsessed with using traditional labor-intensive processes to manifest my vision. The act of hand-making objects from metal has become my Zen.