Saturday, January 9, 2010

Artist statement created 1/9/09 for another installation proposal

In my work, I am interested in creating a non-verbal (or verbal, if necessary) dialogue between the artwork and the audience.  I am interested in work that changes with its viewer and its environment. As each idea generally begins from a reaction to a personal experience, I am often present in my works to further explore ideas of personal versus collective experience.  Like Joseph Beuys' I am America and America is Me, I do not delineate between myself and the artwork.  I ask the audience to share a moment with me as I am experiencing it.  I am interested in creating work which is interactive, which by looking at or interacting with it it, creates a new active experience instead of a passive one.  By using non-artists' materials, I am able to convey these ideas in a way which is playful and has a context outside of the art world.

 

In my recent work, I am interested in creating symbol-like objects: simple single images intended to hold and communicate complex and emotional ideas about identity and human nature.  Once again, I find these works to be similar to Beuys' fat sculptures which are both minimal in form and highly conceptual and emotive.  I also draw from the video work of Kate Gilmore, who creates straightforward and dangerous, yet playful, scenarios to communicate her ideas. 


For my proposed backyart piece, Found Clothing Flag, I am interested in exploring ideas of identity, disregard, and the personal versus collective experience.  By finding pieces of clothing on New York City Streets, I am confronted with ideas of discarded personal identity.  yet, by one throwing away this piece of clothing which may have identified them, these objects then become part of the city's identity: describing and defining our environment.  In return, city goers become affected by their environment, including what may have been trash to someone personally.  By quilting together these articles of abandoned clothing, I am weaving together these pieces of identity one has thrown out to create a sort of city scape, and thus weaving personal experiences into a collective one.  Furthermore, by creating a flag or a quilt, both items which have connotations of clan, tradition, and security, I am exploring ideas of disconnected community and ultimately, trying to reconnect the community that is lost within the narcissism of being a New Yorker.  

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