David Buetsche

David Buetsche, featured in the Time Capsule exhibition, is a contemporary mixed media artist based between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky. His work explores erosion, memory, and the instability of inherited narratives through layered collage, painting, and sculptural intervention. Drawing from archival maritime imagery, found materials, industrial textures, and weathered surfaces, Buetsche constructs fragmented landscapes that examine the emotional and physical breakdown of place over time.

Working across series including GHOSTLINES and SHAPE/WRECK, his practice merges abstraction with traces of architecture, coastline, and historical imagery to create works that feel simultaneously excavated and unfinished. His evolving visual language, often described through the framework of “Coastal Ruinism,” focuses on deterioration as both subject and process.

In addition to his studio practice, Buetsche works as an Art Director and curator, integrating contemporary art and environmental storytelling into hospitality and public spaces.


Artist Statement

My work investigates erosion as both a physical process and a psychological condition. Through collage, painting, abrasion, and material accumulation, I build layered surfaces that examine how memory, landscape, and identity fragment over time.

Using archival imagery, transparency transfers, industrial materials, and weathered textures, the works move between abstraction and representation. Architectural forms dissolve into atmosphere, coastlines disappear beneath layers of paint and dust, and inherited visual histories become unstable or partially obscured. I am interested in the tension between preservation and collapse, what remains visible, what disappears, and what can no longer be fully reconstructed.

Much of the recent work has developed through an ongoing framework I refer to as Coastal Ruinism, a practice rooted in the visual language of structural decay, maritime environments, and the emotional residue left behind by place. Rather than depicting destruction directly, the work focuses on gradual breakdown, accumulation, and transformation.

Across the evolution of my practice, materials themselves have increasingly become active participants in the work. Sanding, cracking, staining, tearing, and layering are not simply techniques but records of time and intervention embedded into the surface. The resulting pieces function less as images and more as fragmented artifacts, traces of landscapes, histories, and structures caught in a continual state of becoming and disappearance.


davidbuetsche.com