Maciek Jasik
Brock Davis is a magician. With a snap of his iPhone he turns a Wiffle ball into a stormtrooper, a knife tip into a shark fin. These perfectly composed visual jokes toy with our sense of scale and shape, and Davis' growing Instagram fame has led to teaching gigs and magazine covers. But Davis, a creative director at a Minneapolis ad agency, humbly considers himself “an artist who has been able to survive in a business environment.” His phone, he says, is a tool to bring his ideas to life.
When do your ideas strike?
They come out of nowhere. My wife cut up a piece of garlic and it looked like a duck dipping its head underwater. So I just took a photo with the phone—that quick turnaround keeps me from over-art-directing to where the idea starts to feel contrived.
How has the iPhone changed the way you work?
When I started using my iPhone to take photos, I had just finished a project where I attempted to make something each day for a year. That prepared me for the mindset of spontaneity I had when I was a kid—you just think of something and go draw it or make it. With the iPhone, particularly with apps like Instagram, there's a nice marriage of spontaneity and creativity, plus immediate gratification. When you have an idea, you have a device with you that's able to document and share it. We all do a lot of the same routines. We have to eat, we have to get dressed, we have to go to work, we have to travel from one location to another. In that process, there are countless observations to make. The phone gives me a chance to capture those kinds of moments—to take something you're familiar with and put a little twist on it. Sometimes I can give something ordinary a sense of importance.
Do you spend a lot of time staring at vegetables and fruits?
Yeah, some people have labeled me a food artist. But really, food is just a prominent part of life. Everyone has looked at a piece of broccoli and seen a tree. In the comments on my Instagram feed, people will often say, “I've looked at that before and I've thought that same thing.” That's what I like! There are almost unspoken truths about these things that we don't talk about except when we're kids.
Do you feel a pressure to post frequently?
There's a natural pressure that the more eyeballs on my account, the more I need to be posting. But I feel like I should just continue to make work for myself when I feel inspired to do it.
Does inspiration ever strike at inconvenient times?
Yes! Often I have an idea and I know I can make it quickly. So even though we have someone coming over for dinner or my son and I are just sitting down to do his homework, I have to go and try to make it while the idea's hot. Like one time, there was a piece of parsley lying near an apple in our kitchen, which was just a mess—we were about to sit down and eat. I'm like, “I wonder if this will look how I think it will look.” I put the parsley on top of a Granny Smith apple and it looked like a tree on top of a green hill. So I said, “Hold on, I'll be back in five minutes.” It was already dark outside, so I turned on a photo light and put a piece of poster board behind the apple for a clean background. After some trial and error, I showed my wife, and she's like, “Yeah that's great. It's time to eat.”
