Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

I am a visual artist reflexively drawn to paradox: driven by a desire to blur boundaries—between painting and sculpture, the abstract and representational, subject and object. This talk, considering both my own and other artists’ work, attempts to explain why. My own pieces are visually volatile renderings of simple forms and ordinary objects made by painting multiple layers of transparent polyester film, aligned and suspended on rods from the ceiling. With the layers’ alignment constantly in flux, viewers must repeatedly reassess and reconfigure what they are perceiving: from certain angles the pieces appear solidly extended in space, from others flat and compressed, from yet others they seem to fold into space and disappear. The paper suggests this elusive and ambiguous physicality is “apocalyptic,” in a sense demonstrated in work by 18th-century poet/artist William Blake, for whom apocalypse is a psychological experience of both destruction and revelation. If the pieces seem two- or three-dimensional, abstract or figurative, ephemeral or enduring, coming together or coming apart, it is because they strive to confound viewers, by rendering the categories we use to make sense of things we see relatively useless. But ideally, from this bewilderment also develops a state of concentrated curiosity liberated in some measure from ingrained habits of looking and thinking. For Blake this kind of experience—paying careful attention to incomprehensible things—is both a “Wilderness,” and an “improvement of sensual enjoyment,” one that might even prove instructive and salutary beyond gallery and museum walls.