My work has always been one of oppositions playing off each other in an attempt to both create and define the personal. This “personal” is my awareness of my self as an individual and the social and cultural structures that both create and define an individual. I have been currently looking at all the self portraits that flood our digital world with there attempt to express ones uniqueness at the same moment reinforcing the droning sameness of what I refer to as the digital bloat. It seems to me our world filled with millions of individuals has been reduced to nothing but surface. Here are a couple of images that deal with this idea in my work. The two are chosen to show both the side of my work that comes from my neo expressionist roots and the more conceptual side that looks at the structures that operate in social and cultural constructs. I must stress that I have been working on what might be called “sketches” in order to better understand the shift that I am taking in the painting studio to an installation presentation of work. I am only showing my “sketches” at this point but will eventually get to the paintings when these ideas take hold and direct them.
Artists, (and scientists, writers, philosophers, etc...) stand out when they are able to successfully organize information, either in a way that everyone can understand or in a way that no one has thought of before.
ReplyDeleteThe information has always been there, in nature. First language, then formal education and then technology (printing press, radio, tv, computers) has allowed humans to organize that information.
I also think that the ability to more precicely organize information and the concept of the individual evolved kind of hand in hand. Both are pretty modern.
The "bloat" may be the blowback of, the synergy between, unrestrained individulaism and the technology that processes and organizes the vast amounts of information individualism produces.
The surface is all most of us can take in. The surface reflects back what we project onto it. It's the easiest way to look at something and the most narcissistically rewarding. The Gaze.