Submitted by Rachel Scott on Mon, 2006-11-27 16:21.
Artist Statement
Working across the disciplines of painting, performance, video and photography, my practice self-referentially explores the co-dependency of the idealised and the abject. By privileging vision and the visual image, the work investigates the construction of the surface by uncovering and laying bare its various components. Gesture and language are employed to inscribe and delineate static and temporal space, making critical use of a sense of place as a trigger for personal introspection, self-analysis and art production.
Performance video works such as I still haven’t found what I’m looking for (I’m not very good at looking for things), 2006, hot not, 2006, and (Like) watching paint dry, 2006, are invested with ideas of failure, longing, human weakness and self-consciousness. The videos are single shots, filmed on location in the private spaces of the garage studio, suburban front garden and sub-let New York apartment. Employing self-deprecating humour and confessional-like candour, they operate as roughly drawn sketches or diary entries: a direct and unmediated communication subverting the line between public and private. By pulling apart the process of art making, the role of the artist and the idea of the public ‘face’, the work dissolves the distinction between art and life and focuses on the individual’s psychological world; simultaneously perpetuating and critiquing the contemporary compulsion for one’s existence to be expressed and inscribed through the camera lens.
The recent project Walk the line (2006) included painting, photography, video and detritus from the painting process. Exposing the artist’s existential crisis in the studio, the installation juxtaposed the controlled, mediated gesture with the improvised, performative gesture.
The construction of the multi-layered, hard-edged geometric paintings requires many rolls of masking tape to ensure contained, sharp lines within a composition of grid-like multiplicities. After they have served their purpose, these painted strips of tape become piles of gestural excess: the messy, rubbishy, alter ego of the finished paintings, usually discarded and unacknowledged. Operating as a counterpoint to the control and precision displayed in the paintings and a response to Minimalism’s desire to rid itself of gestural mark making, the performance video work and piles of masking tape detritus offered a behind-the-scenes exposé of the everyday anxieties and banalities of making art.
Art Forms
Conceptual
Media arts
2 D (painting/printmaking/drawing/illustration/cartoons)
Performance
Artists publishing
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