missionstatement

SERIES OF COMPLETE WORKS:

The main task for my practice is to produce a body of work that explores the ambiguity in our Western culture and its platitudes through image making. To delineate through painting a juxtapositioning of visual and narrative form. To recontextualize familiar tropes creating a (discontinuity) and a dialogue of the strange. This will reflect morally ambiguous portraits of the world.

My work will create an ongoing development of the painted image that reflects its corporeality and links directly to issues in contemporary art practice.   Conjunct and essential to artists is the necessity to mirror their times while generating an art that is timeless. Time is suspended. The importance of the work will be to produce an art, which may be a perfect representation of a unique ephemeral moment in time and place. What is important is to experience the work as a "a sensation of time". Not the sense of time but the physical cessation of time…...............
I want to compress the viewer's first contact and later ruminations into a single illuminated moment outside ordinary time; a new dimension where perception is instantaneous. This impulse to produce seemingly timeless work and its collided juncture with dealing with wider social issues creates an oxymoron that should deal with active participation rather than passive indifference.   The rationale for my painting programme is through the means of art works that expose the perceived paradox and challenge our own sense of culpability.

The art of pure inquiry is an open interface between the pure subject-all that is out there- and the pure potential of the individual perceiver-all that is in here. A thread will develop linking the works that mimic sites from dreams or memories. Therefore enabling the geometry of the spaces to snap into focus. The investigation into the darker side of the contemporary psyche, will present a visual dialogue that will culminate in a body of work that will reflect a thoughtfully provocative, eerily specific experiences that challenges public perception and aspirations in regards to contemporary image making.

In my present and future work my installations will aim to intensify the public's experience of the chosen space or provide the public with a new enriched perception of their surroundings. In this sense, the central focus of my work, will be expressed not solely through the work itself but rather through the relationships which is established between the work and the space for which it is seen and more importantly relate with the space the viewer engages with in his /her own world.
"Perception does not give me truths like geometry but presences." Maurice Merleau-Ponty

WORKING METHODS:

Salman Rushdie:" Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved….Those of us who have been forced by cultural displacement to accept the provisional nature of all truths, all certainties, have all had modernism forced upon us."

These fictional documentaries will use a vocabulary derived from popular culture assimilated with classic painting ideals and techniques. The presence of the familiar yet disjointed narratives will use actual sources in the real world not unlike material from movies, video clips, magazines, television and the Internet; especially in regards to the linear sequence of television. There are moments where the boundary of convergence between reality and fiction are often blurred. It is in this void, from the familiar to the "impossible-to-place or the space-in-between these disparate forces that I will work within, underpinning conventional taxonomies and re-positioning existent meaning.

Emphasis will be placed on adapting works to existing conditions and on the merging of the collected imagery within the given surroundings. Through investigation, this body of work will address the specific needs of that which would guide the creative process, resulting in a lyric interplay with ineluctable manipulations of scale, volume, light and line, that in essence will be the artistic component (of the work).

I want to engage the viewer with the juxtaposed sliding scale of materiality, transparency, deferral and reverberation, generating a psychology of space. Unlike appropriation art by Duchamp or the cynical appropriation art of the 1980's, I will endeavour to recontextualize into my own iconographic world selecting specific images that are valued for their own emotive content.   Much like digital sampling the paintings will attach themselves to emotional archetypes directly effecting the psyche where the viewer is free to absorb the rearranged signs in order to establish a dialogue between the work I create, the space within which I install it and the viewers whom experience it. "To focus perception on it's own textures and on perceptions complicity with the place where it occurs. There's an invitation to understand that if one is to be one must be somewhere, immersed in the site, living through the immersion in one's own portion of time." Aural Spaces, Carter Ratcliff, Art and America, October 1987 p161

Mission Statement

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