KELLY WRITERS HOUSE
ARTIST STATEMENTS
To keep personal records, I take an "event" which I have experienced,
small to big, into the place inside me which, like a box or a shelf or
even a basin, with warm moist soil. After I leave it alone for while, it
grows slowly, forms shape, wears texture and draws on some color. It is
like they have their own mind and have a place to go or have a final form
to be. This is all inside me but I become a total observer of this
possession of different natures. I give name and existence to this
metamorphosis as my own personal document. It becomes my sculpture. For
example, one time I was betrayed by someone I trusted, I made a series of
"wounds." Its form went from raw wounds to a healing process. Keeping
records is my behavior to fill in missing parts of my own being. This is
my way to realize the indispensable assurance of humanity and to try to be
a complete being.
An experimental interaction with others is to create an environment to
enhance realization of existence and connections. I encourage people to
touch and interact with my work. In one piece, I made 11 3"by3"by3"
triangular boxes, and asked others to bring me a little object from their
childhood and tell a story about the object. Another piece, I took
pictures of eyes, lips, ears, hands and feet from 11 different people.
Then printed and bounded them into 11 books. So each book is an individual
person. These projects lead to connect with others and also bring desire
to get to know where others come from, both physically and mentally.
The feeling of connection and realization is a necessary condition for
existence. I seek these feelings through my work.
"Artist Statement 2": Daniel
Nelson
Why share this daydream in presenting an artist statement?
It occurred to me as I looked at my earlier student work that everything
with which I dealt had something to do with the development of my identity
in regard to my physical and temporal location. I live in the city after
all. At the time of this writing it is late autumn in 2003; I am 21 years
old. At every waking moment I am unconsciously determining who I am in
relationship to my physical and social surroundings. In this case it is
decidedly urban, so think: movement, the grid, dilapidated buildings, car
alarms, strung out or uptight people on the street, etc. It is likewise
significant that I moved to this northeastern seaboard city from Florida
not four years ago; a sprawl of suburb on the Gulf. Geographic
displacement exacerbates one's need for a sense of locational identity.
What about temporal identity? How does one develop over time? How does
one experience time? How does this development in and experience of time
determine one's selfhood?
"The leaves that are green turn to brown" (from an old song).
My attention here turns to things, (the found, the happenstance, the
quotidian), particularly to garbage, the detritus of urban culture. A
found object has a history that charges it with meaning, even if its
history and meaning are hidden. By relating to a given object that comes
from a specific time and place, one is likewise relating to that time and
place. I am primarily interested in the thing's latent potential for
becoming art, a process by which the found object's subjectivity is
altered and/or heightened due to the change of its context. Or, to put it
more simply, I take something and turn it into something else. This
synthesis of material is nothing less than alchemy. This is the process
by which mountains and rivers are no longer such, umbrellas become birds,
scraps of metal become color patches. The creative use of materials here
echoes the process in which one conceptualizes the world, namely,
interpretation. In using (visual) analogies, metaphors, and puns, one is
engaging in a process of ordering and making sense of things, essentially
a faculty of survival. At its most basic, however, my artmaking involves
a variety of media, including oil, encaustic, and aqueous painting;
collage and assemblage; drawing and printmaking media. The process in
which it comes together is synthetic; it is intuitive and organic yet
organizational and reasoned. It operates somewhere between the discipline
of formal study and the free abandon of play.
My art never strays from my personal aesthetic instincts and
sensibilities. Perhaps this is what my art comes to: beauty as a gift to
whomever may meet me halfway. And if somebody meets me there for the sake
of beauty I would hope for them to leave thinking about their own life:
the narrative of their past, their present time and place, their
frustrations and fears, desires and decisions.
"Artist Statement 3": Jason
Loebs
Benjamin saw the advent of photography as central to the proletariat's
struggle against the might of the bourgeois society. Mainly because of
the reproductive possibilities of photography, Benjamin envisaged it
functioning as social medium subservient to the needs of the proletariat.
My central interests lie not in provoking the creation of a "universal art
for the proletariat," but with a critique of our pictorial culture.
Benjamin's reflection on the social influence that the reproduced image
would have on culture has been felt in many ways. Most startling, the way
the reproduced image has made its way into all areas of culture through
signs, TV images, posters, personal photography and picture magazines. I
think if Benjamin were to see today's cultural atmosphere he would be
alarmed to find that the "bourgeois establishment" has used Mechanical
Reproduction for its own profit. Whereas Benjamin had hoped the
proletariat would ultimately gain from mechanical reproduction, it seems
that they have been subjugated by the establishment's visual culture.
Rather than combating this crisis through a creation of a democratic
aesthetic or by politicizing art, I seek to re-contextualize via
appropriation the seemingly banal images that permeate our way of life.
By using these found images as a conceptual starting point, I relate their
appropriation to a use of a "ready-made," much like Duchamp's
prefabricated objects or Picabia's found photographs. By critiquing the
reproducible and transitory image, I seek to provoke questions about
Benjamin's ideas on the destruction of aura, tradition, and the cult
value of an image as it relates to the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
Ultimately, the undermining of any intrinsic dogma--political, artistic,
or social--is at the forefront of my pursuit.
I've always been guilty of a fascination with the visual and
philological credence of popular pictorial culture. I find that my visual
predisposition attracts me to these images because of their cool and
removed and often simplistic formal aesthetic. I note this because I
believe many of the formal and symbolic pictorial ideas advocated by the
academic establishment have now been appropriated by today's
establishment for use in the reproduced image. By appropriating the
pictorial manner the establishment employs to persuade the masses of their
agenda, I seek to defuse the power of their oppressors medium and offer
the exploited a forum where they might combat the persuasiveness of their
oppressors' tactics.
"Zed...": Ratna Khanna
"Artist Statement": Hisako Inoue
As a human being, I live everyday
with universal questions, "What am I
doing? Where am I going? Why am I here?" and "Do I really exist?" I search
to understand these questions and to find their answers. I grope for the
complexities inherent to human consciousness, self-awareness, thoughts,
memories, communications, and also time. To reconfirm what I have
comprehended, I make sculptures. My work can be divided into two kinds, a
very personal act of "keeping records" and an experimental interaction
with others.
When I ride my bike on the east side
of town, heading east on streets such
as Queen or Spring Garden, I get to the point where I can see under the
overpass of I-95 a rectangular swatch of silver blue. The Delaware River.
The ever present (indeed, internalized, oppressive) sense of gridded city
space then dissipates as I imagine traveling with this immense body of
water (by means of canoe, sailboat, or better, hot air balloon). Perhaps
to the north, as it zigzags the border of Pennsylvania and New Jersey,
winding through the Delaware Water Gap of the Kittatinny Mountains before
reaching its headwaters (the Cannonsville Reservoir) in New York State.
Or I could follow the river south and it wouldn't be long before it
emptied into Delaware Bay, enclosed by the hook of Cape May, New Jersey to
the northeast and the landform of Delaware, Maryland and Virginia yielding
to it in its terminus of the Ocean. With the Ocean the whole world opens
to me.
Unmistakably, reproduction as offered by picture magazines
and
newsreels
differs from the image seen by the unarmed eye. Uniqueness and permanence
are as closely linked in the latter as are the transitoriness and
reproducibility in the former. To pry an object from its shell, to
destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose "sense of the
universal equality of things" has increased to such a degree that it
extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.
--Walter Benjamin, "The
Work of Art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Favorites. I don't have any. I
cannot think of a favorite film, song,
fruit or a book that I have loved best. I like more than one, but a few as
opposed to many. Perhaps this is a reason why some of my art comes about
in a series. My art is a kind of jambalaya consistent of a distinct
flavor. Heterogeneous yet homogeneous. Sculpting, photographing,
print-making and painting are ways. Ways in which I turn my field into a
uniform workspace. This motley mix of methods in art-making are a practice
in which I search to make sense of the variety in a whole. They act as a
catalyst for several conceptions. Working with and trying to understand
the nature of materials. Their conditions and conformations and eventual
adaptation to my process. Acknowledging the existence of the passage of
time in mortality. Walking, breathing, perceiving. How important it is to
understand individuality in mortality. Man or woman rather than man and
woman. A very specific man and a very specific woman. I seek questioning
rather than answering, listening rather than speaking, comprehension
rather than dictation. I look into myself a lot. I turn inward, as
introspection is a way in which I understand and so create.