SubscribeI want to discuss the deeper levels of my work tonight. These thoughts all began in a studio visit with Josef Schultz, which was a little over a year ago, and are just now within my power to vocalize.
In one way, my work revolves around an almost religious debate. The surface and its revealed understructure mirror the myths of creation and the creations of myth. I make works that are representative of intangibles--objects and moments that we know are present but can't be directly observed. The Black Holes are three-dimensional objects that break down into voids with the willful suspension of disbelief and return to their existence as physical, man-made constructions when the viewing angle shifts.
The Collisions operate in a similar manner. They focus on the imperceptible moment when a collision happens--the electrons on the surfaces of two objects pass back and forth but never touch, that infinitesimally brief moment of impact that we only perceive through its effects. These pieces center around the idea that we cannot create the intangible--creation and intangibility are mutually exclusive by their very definitions. Even words, texts, ideas are tangible things. Gods, even, exist in an intertextual sense. They exist as words, ideas, man-made creations. This is undeniable. The fact that we talk about gods makes the gods exist, but we are attempting to create intangible presences. We know it is a false path. Like Duerer's Melencolia I, a perfect sphere cannot be created by cutting planes from a stone. At best, we can approximate; yet, we continue.
The newly added cut-up text/geometry pieces are part of the same debate. The language is perceivable, but it is illegible. It can be pieced back together mentally, but it is a visual clutter. Why make text-based work if it can't be read? Shouldn't text be communicative? To me, these are reflections, facets of the larger question: If we can't create the intangible that we know exists, why create at all? The answer is, of course, circular and unsatisfactory: Create to continue to approximate the intangible because it will otherwise cease to exist. The myth requires maintenance.