Texts
________________________________________

Excerpt from The Age of the World Target by Rey Chow:

            Once upon a time, Foucault tells us, there was a great kinship between words and things. As the two were linked to each other by resemblance and proximity, to know language--than is, to master the rules of representation--was simultaneously to know the world in its inexhaustible plenitude. Over time, however, that natural kinship began to disintegrate, and words and things increasingly drifted apart. What was once a continuum mutated into disparate entities, and ways had to be devised to mend this progressively complicated (because increasingly differentiated) state of affairs. In the classical age (the period from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth), representation took the form of signification, whereby signs--not just words but numbers, tables, and various grids of classification--would be imposed on the world to generate meanings.
             In the modern age (from the early nineteenth century to the present), even these grids have become unable to hold together the thorough rift between language and the universe, and knowledge of the world can no longer be assumed to result logically from representations that seem to refer to it. Instead, it has become increasingly inadequate merely to “know” something in its empirical form or even through the artificial signs that “order” them. More and more pressing is the need to explore the conditions of possibility, the terms on which knowledge itself is produced. As claims to boundary-free knowing become untenable, modern knowledge in turn becomes self-reflexive; cut off from its previous kinship to the world, knowing is, ever more so, an attempt to know how knowledge itself comes into being…Moreover, man has entered both as object and as subject, whose truth and visibility are henceforth inextricable from a web of intertwining thresholds, boundaries, and limits.

2006 Duke University Press. Pages 2-3
[Italics are mine]

 

________________________________________

 

Div|duals

Geoffrey Owen Miller is a Brooklyn based artist who explores the sociological meanings of iconic imagery. Through various methods of painting he looks for ways to create spaces for the viewer to actively re-insert themselves in the identification of the icon. By complicating the image through various means of controlled and uncontrolled mark-making, the viewer is pushed to consider the context and definition in their search to identify what they are seeing.

The mind seeks to create closure of form by means of context, experience, and learned biases of perception. In the fractured repetition of his imagery we still try to see what we have been conditioned to see, and that is where ones own perceptual filters can emerge. Those subconscious tendencies we color our perception that then shape our culture and institutions.

Dividuals explore the divide between the individual and the group. While Gilles Delueze states with concern that “[i]ndividuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks,’” Arthur Koestler sees our whole-ness or part-ness as dependent on the point of view. Instead of the atomistic view of distinct parts, he proposes the concept of a Holon: a unit that is simultaneously a whole and a part.

 

Home-cosmographies

Home-Cosmographies, takes its title from Thoreau’s Walden, “Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find a thousand regions of your mind yet undiscovered. Travel them and be expert in home-cosmography.” The Stacked images started as a formal exploration in the creation of implied space. The Composed images started integrating other forms of iconic representation. This multi-channel composition allows for the direct relation, and interaction, of various spatial and image signifiers, (for example: the binary stripe, the flag, bands, fields, or ray.) with certain zones being more or less correlated with constructed or naturalistic space.

“[B]e a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.” - Thoureau.

 

Human Nature

In these paintings, images that record those moments after momentously disastrous act have been repeated symetrically to become classically balanced.

Photos, such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor or oil derricks in Iraq are taken from our visual archive are painted and pressed into the opposing side of the canvas.  Both sides are alternatively directly painted and both sides receive the printed traces of the other, complicating which side could be considered the original or the duplicate.

Like an inkblot Rorschach test, a random, uncontrolled act becomes a visually structured image. We naturally look for meaning in the symmetrical patterning, as it is a sign of life. Repeating and balancing the images against one another creates stability that regularizes the original violent acts.

Culture continually creates our heavens and our hells. Reflected violence becomes the stable structures with which we support our edifices.

 

A Travesty of Termination

A good friend worked for a billionare. Their life seemed insanity-- fitting of Lewis Carrol. The installation and performance was based around a murder mystery dinner, the viewer was invited to find who terminated the maid. Jojo Lin was the only one to guess the guilty character. He found a loop-hole in the rules and submitted guesses about almost half of the family.

 

Apaches*

A complex shape that had incredibly loaded connotation and could be fractured quite easily.  A base for exploring signification in stroke, color, and texture combinations in which meaning is created. This is complicated further by the changing contexts of the surrounding helicopters. The more paintings that are assembled, the quicker the eye makes out that complex shape, but at the same time the increasing combinations of color, stroke, and texture make the meaning more convoluted.

 

Freedom Flies

Painted the third year into the Iraq war while the Republican controlled White House and Congress still controlled the focus of the United States. An Apache Longbow ™ attack helicopter flies above a Van Gogh landscape populated with frogs and toads.

Apache Indians fought the United States Military for land, resources, and self-determination. While at this time Apache, Comanche, and Blackhawk Indian tribes were deemed 'savages', their names were later appropriated by the US Military for their allusions to American bravery and fierceness in battle. The Apache Longbow ™ was first deployed in Operation Just Cause (Panama, 1989), then subsequently in Operation Desert Storm (Iraq, 1990), Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan, 2001), and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq, 2003).

George W. Bush announced the Iraq war with these words, “Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.” (cnn.com Wednesday, March 19, 2003)

As of June 6, 2009 there has been documentation of between 92,300 and 100,775 civilian deaths from violence in Iraq according to iraqbodycount.org.

All ironic gestures are intentional.