Here I Am: October 2007

10.30.2007

another morsel of bullshit from art school

The dreaded artist statement. If I have to live with it, you do too.

We do not have the ability to understand the world from outside ourselves. Despite having only a primary filter, the dynamism, the contradictions, the vastness of the world manages to inhabit us. There are comings and goings in combinations, fantasies, pleasantries, meditation, trance, silence, boredom, exhaustion; the thousands of thoughts and actions that are never realized; the millions of thoughts that will never be thought. There is a hierarchy in terms of actualization but not of importance. The unrealized, the momentary, and the unconscious cannot be identified and physical existence does not characterize value. There is a surplus. We carry on.

Is there meaning contained in the place were we hold onto things prior to logic, prior to reason? In this work, meaning can happen spontaneously, by fluke, in multitudes, without order. This is not an attempt at obscuring truths, but an interest at the public creation of truth through means that are confused, sometimes contradictory. Uncertainty is a constant; it has fascinated philosophers, statisticians, physicists, and economists for centuries. It validates us as humans to understand uncertainty, but being uncertain has never been a good enough answer. Defining value statements confirms and justifies ones life, however, life is unsettled by absolutes. How do we navigate the mystic magnetism, the alluring confidence of those absolute meanings, those definitive choices? We give in to functioning with uncertainty—through accepting contradictions. This work is fascinated by material language and it mistrusts it. It presents objects as having both ethereal and commonplace significance. It is meticulously conscious and deliriously present. It constructs objects and spaces because it is fascinated with deconstructing them. Humor perpetuates melancholy and visa versa. It is singular, elitist. It is plural, a dynamo. It is a confident gamble. It is abashed of and dependent on the significance, the fetishism of objects.

I am perplexed by installation, by display. A collection of objects and images speak to each other and to their space. When an object is displayed singularly what is it speaking to? Creating links between a body of objects cannot happen without creating simultaneous disconnect; gaps form, voids are created, vibrations generated; all in the name of meaning. What is before us is never enough. There isn’t fullness without desire. When an object, a thought, is presented by way of singularity, One creates connections for fear that without tactile association, there is no meaning. However, in a universe that expands, how can knowledge be limited by an evaluation of consequence?

Kant spoke of a Copernican Revolution such that nothing changed as a result of finding that the earth moved around the sun—but everything changed. My work is an attempt at understanding and being a part of this kinetic energy. Things moving, things changing, people making physical choices based on an understanding of things that only seem to be new. We constantly categorize knowledge and ascribe meanings, and even with a devout commitment to these activities, there is flux in belief. I am skeptical of a voice that mounts these momentous tasks with any consistency or fluidity or composure. This work began out of many Copernican Revolutions, and the vignettes that exist within it—through the reworking of objects and ideas—hopes to stimulate One person’s individual Copernican Revolution. The world exists and is witnessed. The person witnesses and makes a change. The world changes and in this new present, the world exists once again.

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