BIRTH OF A NEW FANTASY
My aim is to make space for freer ways of looking and existing with our environment and each other. I often juxtapose the quotidienne with the strange in order to create a space where perceptual shifts happen in how we view ourselves and that which is outside of us.
This body of work looks at images and the symbols they become, how we create the meaning for these symbols, and how this meaning can then proliferate.
I often reference elements of nature as well as primal concepts...in taking them out of context and putting them with the unexpected, I elevate how they operate...as symbols of abundance, mystery, knowledge. Trees, open sky, text and instinctual recognition in mammals...specifically those active in breast feeding and facial recognition...are all recurring symbols.
I then use fractured mirrors in a lot of the work as a way to heighten the viewer's subjectivity while they perceive these objects...in other words the mirrors place the viewer as a subject into the environment that is the art...and thereby puts this viewer's experiences, feelings, beliefs, and desires into the foreground with other elements of the artwork.
The work is meant to be a collision-- a collision of the viewer-subject, with digital media, with my physical experience of material, and with these symbols. I think when seemingly disparate or potentially opposing elements are forced to collide on equal footing, that there is a mental renegotiation that occurs and then space is opened up out of this paradox.
Play is a central part to my practice and aesthetic and i invite the audience to participate in this play by contributing their own configurations of these symbols. From painting fragments that I've made into stickers each visitor will contribute to a collage on the wall. The overall configuration will be generated by each individual's own associations and systems of knowing. We're creating something together out of play in this liminal space-- something that acquires a greater subjective meaning with each additional participant.
With this collaborative component of the exhibition, I'm charting the movement of discrete potentially unrelated elements from passive discourse into active intercourse and then into limitless proliferation with each other-- a potential metaphor for actualising a new beginning.