Texts
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How we decide what is probable depends on how we define what we see.
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Politics, religion, and science walked into a bar. Art ducked.
I paint units to build and disassemble what I thought I knew,
so new contexts are created and with them, a possibility to perceive anew.
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Div|duals
In trying to find a form to paint about our contemporary society, I have expanded on the concept of a Dividual. In this case they are small, pattern-based abstractions that are both freestanding yet modular.
Each painting is made up of multiple layers of painted images. The resulting woven image becomes an unknown schema (a shape or plan) through which personal perception, belief, and identity can emerge.
Each Dividual can function singularly, although most become more powerful in arrangements of pairs or groups. These groupings are in turn influenced by their context. Each familiar yet undefined form shifts identities depending on the most proximate likeness.
Each Dividual is painted in oil on handmade cradled panels.
"An individual is usually defined as an indivisible, self-contained unit, with a separate, independent existence of its own. But individuals in this absolute sense are nowhere found in Nature or society, just as we nowhere find absolute wholes. Instead of separateness and independence, there is co-operations and interdependence, running through the whole gamut, from physical symbiosis to the cohesive bonds of the swarm, hive, shoal, flock, herd, family, society. The picture becomes even more blurred when we consider the criterion of 'indivisibility'. The word 'individual' originally means just that; it is derived from the latin in-dividuus--as atom is derived from the Greek a-tomos. But on every level, indivisibility turns out to be a relative affair. Protozoa, sponges, hydra, and flatworms can multiply by simple fission or budding: that is, by breaking up of one individual into two or more, and so on, ad infinitum. As von Bertalanffy wrote: 'How can we call these creatures individual when they are in fact "dividua", and their multiplication arises precisely from division?" --Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine
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Home-cosmographies
Home-Cosmographies are a series of watercolors which take thier 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 an exploration in the creation of implied space while the Composed images integrated in 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.
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Human Nature
In these multi-layered oil paintings, images that record those moments after momentously disastrous act have been symmetrically repeated to become classically balanced.
Like an inkblot Rorschach test, a random, uncontrolled act becomes a visually stable image just by its repetition. Yet, as one looks to identify the resulting image, there is an understanding that the image is subjective, and hence remain unstable.
The sources of the images come from photos. Historical images of the bombing of Pearl Harbor or oil derricks in Iraq, are are painted and pressed into the opposing side of the canvas. Both sides are directly painted and both sides receive the traces of the other, complicating which side could be considered the original or the duplicate.
"The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water." --Eugene Ionesco
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A Travesty of Termination
A good friend worked for a billionare. Their life seemed insanity-- fitting of Lewis Carrol. The installation, drawings, and performance were based around a murder mystery dinner, the viewer was invited to find who terminated the maid. A friend was the only one to guess the guilty character, even though I refused to give him hints. He found a loop-hole in the rules and submitted guesses about almost half of the family.
"The Red Queen shook her head, 'You may call it 'nonsense' if you like,' she said, 'but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!'"— Lewis Carroll
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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.
Oil on handmade wood panels.
"What therefore, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms;…truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions." ---Nietzsche as quoted by Spivak
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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.
"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master— that's all."
--Lewis Carroll
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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]
Power has its principle not so much in a person as in an arrangement whose internal mechanism produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. --Foucault
"If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences." --W. I. Thomas
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