Dakota Higgins

Four Phases

Offset prints, studio debris, 50 state quarters, glitter, microwave nachos, coins from states that used to be Mexico, polypropylene, paper

"My work explores the histories, myths, and images that constitute the American psyche. Using humor as a tool to excavate repressed thoughts and feelings, my work blends traditional forms of visual art including painting, sculpture and collage with writing, sound/music, performance, and social practice. Pivoting from the oft-exclaimed artistic-ism that 'the personal is political,' my life and work insists that the inter-personal is political."

— Dakota Higgins

About the artist

Dakota Higgins

American

Dakota Higgins’ practice is about elusivity — about the ways that subjects evade our capacity to name, depict, articulate or experience them. Secretly, it’s about the fact that he never met his father. Something intelligent about Freud, followed by a well-reasoned and -articulated line about how the Oedipus complex is a metaphor for the Artist’s search for meaning (in art and elsewhere). L’objet petit a, eureka. Higgins grew up in Las Vegas, which provides significant context to the fact that his work is often shiny and has something to do with money.

Dakota has exhibited at venues including Leroy’s, Bozo Mag, Grice Bench, El Clasificado, Navel, Café Quoi‽ & Sculpture Garden, Room 3557, Xela Institute of Art, and Placeholder. Dakota has performed in venues throughout the country, including 2220 Arts + Archives, Coaxial Arts Foundation, Human Resources, Sub Rosa, In Lieu/Ethan Tate Gallery, The Digs Chicago The Sardine, and the Torrance Art Museum. In 2021, he founded the DMV (Departure from Music Venues), a space dedicated to the exhibition of experimental music and performance. His writing has appeared in the art journals King & Lyre and X-TRA, and in a collection of poetry entitled Poetry from Instructions.