Ultimately it’s more satisfying to put up a few images and get a big reaction than to sit on a thousand unseen ones.
In the past year I’ve been exhibiting mostly concrete images of people in situations that convey some type of variable meaning.
I’ve always been attracted to pure abstraction as well, which hardly overlaps the first group of images in any way. Some are distortions of recognizable things, others are non-referential and can only be decoded as patterns of light or a Rorschach blot that can be developed in the mind.
Meanwhile, I’ve stumbled into the meeting place of these two at dusk, where people blur into abstraction.
Added to these topics are images of nature, numbers, parallel lines and other subjects, that I’ve assembled over the years. I find myself poised to depart in several directions, like bees from a hive.
I’m guessing this isn’t a good way to move forward in a coherent direction. I’d like to do more exhibitions, but take greater risks with the imagery.
How can an octopus decide which is the best foot to put forward, without disappearing in a cloud of ink?
An artist’s job is to create new software for people’s perceptions. They juxtapose, abstract, distill their subjects to cajole the minds of participants.
Like messages in bottles, art works are nestled in buildings, magazines, websites and text. Like booby-trapped toys they can silently explode a person’s subjective experience. There might be no outward signs that the event has occurred other than a shrug, but the nerve connections are forged.
There’s a lot of focus on the way artists get to this point - the tools, the training, the techniques and the treasure - so that others can follow. But that’s just part of the artist’s job specification.
For some reason the species produces these subversive agents, then suppresses them in the community, for reasons that go beyond interest in the artists themselves.
As Aldous Huxley pointed out in a 1962 lecture, rats who could press a bar to stimulate their pleasure centres with electrodes in their brain would do so 18,000 times a day. Those rats who could stimulate areas of their brains that mixed pain and pleasure in equal measure wouldn’t push the bar nearly as often, but they did always press it again.
I guess our species has a mix of fear and delight for art, and whatever the results, the artist has to supply the stimulus.
From December 7th to 16th, the Exposure Gallery in Vancouver will present its Winter Salon show. I’ll have two images on view there. Here’s the first one.
I’m not going to tell you the name or what I think it means. Why don’t you tell me?
As this weblog is very new, I don’t expect a flood of response around the posting date - but even years from now I’d appreciate your view.
Cities in ancient civilisations featured giant statues of gods and kings in their town squares. The subliminal effect was that as people led their lives at the feet of the giants they were influenced to believe that they were politically and spiritually puny.
Statues, signs and symbols around us that we don’t even consciously ponder are absorbed into our psyche. I think these influence how we see the world and ourselves, intuitively and irrationally. What they mean for us is subjective, and the subjectivity of meaning is something that interests me.
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Immediately after sniping at Black and White as a medium of expression, I had visions of penguins, zebras, orcas, polar bears and Henri Cartier Breson.
There is a lot I like about BW. The main thing is the huge number of gripping images that I grew up with and that stagger me today. You can argue with the concept of a platypus until you actually meet one, and then the fact of its present beauty overcomes the abstract of its contrast with colour.
So, I repent.
Black and white photos have many shades of grey. So if my view of black and white seems black and white recall the many shades.
I started in black and white photography, in a high school darkroom. A first lesson was that a BW print is actually etched in silver. And by accepting BW I had the power to print photos. But like Jackie Paper leaving Puff, I left for colour photography and never returned to Honalee.
I’m a fan of abstraction. BW is an abstraction by extraction. By removing the colour it focuses the mind on line and tone. It creates a mood. It’s self-referential, because the lack of colour is a constant reminder that it is an artifact, not the subject but a thing in itself. For a modern device, it has a distinctly postmodern meaning. Read the rest of this entry »
Light from the sun hit a woman in the face in Greenwich this summer. Judging by her expression, it hurt. Most of the light then routinely bounced off, hitting in turn the railroad tracks, the surveillance cameras, the passengers and warning signs of a railroad station. One small rectangle of it was interrupted by my camera. An even smaller rectangle entered a new dimension.
The photons hitting my light sensor started a chain reaction of other minute particles also moving near light speed. By a juggling magic scientists must be very proud of, they set up a kind of perpetual motion. The impact of that light from the woman’s face became a series of digital symbols, which were composed of electromagnetically looping particles. Read the rest of this entry »
