Rubble
O.K. Centrum • Linz, Austria 2007
As an artist, I have long been interested in the phenomenology of experience, the relationship of consciousness to all that is immediately available to it. Previous paintings have considered the imaging process of the mind, how the three-dimensional (in my opinion) experience of thought and memory might relate to the two dimensional surface of the picture plane.
Recent work has taken expanded on this interest with the aim of involving the viewer more directly and experientially (spatially and over time) with a slowly evolving dimensional piece. These are my first forays into three-dimensionality, my first attempts at working with experience itself as part of my palette.
A recent installation, "Rubble," moves away from the imaging of the individual mind to discuss more collective experience, the collective experience of devastations of all kinds. Here a large mound of images of destruction that we see everyday (and perhaps have grown numb to) pictures of my own losses complicated losses inextricable jumbled up therein, occupies much of the exhibition space. Bit by bit, over several days, I rearrange the pile, putting the images up on a wall, with increasing difficulty as the images at the bottom of the pile are very thin, fragile, almost dust. The image created on the wall is one of nature: simple, enduring, existing before and beyond our sufferings and our great forgetting.
In the end, that too goes.
Though drawn to the potential of time-based media, - the physicality, and relative uselessness of things left behind, interests me at the moment. I believe in this particularly wasteful period historically it is important to relate our stories to one another and to not overlook the gift that our individual lives are, however vulnerable and fleeting. I feel it is important for me to involve people physically and experientially with artworks. It is my aim to rekindle appreciation for the priviledge and ultimate mystery of simple experience.