This statement is an act of equalization, of destruction of meaning through reduction. Each work presented here was created because of different motivations, yet I am trying to minimize that so as to find a common pattern. Each work reflects different personal tastes and is filtered through different circumstances of my life. That is the only true quality that unifies my work--that there is a personal element that I have consciously included, even if only trivial. I can't help but seek deeper patterns, however. It's something that I do, and it's something that all of us do. I suppose I have an interest in this pattern seeking itself--in the creation and destruction of meaning, through the loss and formation of information through shifts in context.

       A collage brings together different fragments into a new and forced context. A collage may or may not preserve some sense of the original meaning those fragments might have had, but a collage always implicates its parts in a new meaning even if none is intended. The image These Are Scans, for example, plays with this notion--pointing hands suggest hidden meaning, while the title blandly states what the image is in fact composed of.
      Computers are a wonderful tool for collage, for compositing. With digital imaging capability, everything is projected onto the common ground of information, which has endless permutations, and endless mutability. We can create meaning where it wasn't before. We can imply it where it isn't. And you don't even need glue.

       Collages find their reality through the accumulation of an artist's selections from found sources. Equalization is the process on the opposite pole from selection, when we finally paste those choices into a single collage. Every creation of a new context destroys information. The new meaning of the forced context overwrites the old. We sometimes perform this equalization by overemphasizing one trait at the expense of others. In collection, physical forms ranging from trash to books to human body parts are reduced first to a photographic surrogate, and then all are displayed in a grid with the label of "object"--a common ground is found. Sometimes, it is through the imposition of a shared trait, such as ownership, or perhaps the uniform format of an encyclopedia, or a dictionary. My Dictionary Selection series takes this one step further, by approaching the text just as a visual form, and then cropping it according to compositional desires regardless of semantic meaning. The homogenized text of alphabetically enumerated words becomes just another thing seen, depicted like anything else in the seen world.

       The knife that I used to butter my toast (and three others I didn't) offers itself at the heart of this creation and destruction of meaning. The significance of an object at the center of an admittedly mundane narrative is known only through the display's title, and the handwritten inscription. The ability to rightfully place this meaning on a single object is lost, the information destroyed through the non-differentiated display of the four knives. As a parallel, the highly self-conscious display for Cherry Coke tries (one could say far too hard) to place the subject in a position where the only thing certain is that meaning is being asserted, of something impersonal and mass-produced. In Souvenir, found love letters allude to the duration of a relationship--emerging repetitions of phrases show cycles of misunderstandings and apologies without narrating the incidents. Postmarks and dated letters describe a period of time over which these fragmented documents act as punctuation marks for now unspoken sentences.

      Ultimately, this all comes across as a tendency to mock, as a constant strain of irony, and I don't have a problem with that. That's the consequence of trying to play in that middle ground between loss and preservation, between commitment and distance. All else being equal, that seems to be what I find entertaining.

postdlf
2001

In Love And Reason I Trust © 1997-2006 postdlf