Friday 18 February 2011

An explanation.

I thought it would be ok to be more specific about what interests me and encourages me to make visual work. 
My work involves an attempt to give form to absence, a kind of framing of silence.








It can be defined as a futile search for enlightenment and an attempted grasp of Utopia, which can never be attained but which is not unavailing. 







If we can consider light as a positive form and a presence, then we could infer a negative absence in the regard of shadows. By pinpointing and attributing such qualities, shadows and light form a language of negative and positive, silence and utterance, lack and abundance, and so forth. 






































By developing a language from those things, using lines as signifiers of and interlocutors between absence and presence, what is known and what is not, we can learn of such elusive properties as absence and presence themselves. 


















This envolves being constantly engaged with any given environment I inhabit.In order to not let absence pass me by.














To try and touch the Silence...


In my most recent practice, visually, this takes the form of photographs (in themselves contentious as indexical documents and contortionists of time) of architectural forms, particularly passages, windows and doors (in-between spaces whose meaning is conventionally dictated by their contextual functionality.







 






Spaces often considered lesser parts of a whole,














 pathways between the corporeal and discarnate... 








                                       Vessels to emptiness.



Friday 11 February 2011

Soundless Sayings... A lesson in tolerance, perception, and insight, perhaps. (?)


The following images are not meant to read as crude literal illustrations to accompany the text. I just wanted to share both image and text, (the photographs are of my own taking, the text borrowed from Dauenhauer borrowing from Merleau-Ponty in Silence; The Phenomenon, and its Ontological Significance.) in a sort of exercise in the juxtapositions of image and text...

Put very simply, what interests me is;
Absence and Presence, Dark and Light, High and Low, the great balancing. 







"Nothing, no side of a thing, shows itself except by actively hiding the others,
denouncing them in an act of concealing them."





 



"To see is a matter of principle to see farther than one sees, to reach a latent existence."





    



"The invisible is the outline and the depth of the visible."








"The visible does not admit of pure positivity any more than the invisible does"        


   






 "In both of these dimensions,
    presence and absence, 
           the world and its things 
                 call for interrogation."







"This interrogation is, in principle, interminable because the call is interminable"





 



"Interrogation is jointly constituted by discourse and silence. The world itself must exist in the interrogative mode, that is, as an open field for inquiry"







"The world itself, like man, is not all of a piece. 

Both the being of a man and the being of the world are constituted by both positivity and negativity. Each of these as the reverse of the other, encroaches on the other. 

The negative is not the denial of the positive, but rather its depth.

In both the being of man and in that of the world, there a paradoxical identity in difference, an identity of the visible and the invisible"








"Man himself is constituted by both a positive and a negative element, distinctly human performances will all similarly manifest these two elements"






"Being, simultaneously, in man, in the world, and in their intersection, reveals and conceals"






                                                 

                                                                 



Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius...

"The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor..."







"From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them..."






One avenue traversed and re-mapped, a wandering on the first path of the Labyrinths volume of short stories, Jorge Luis Borges.



[Silence]

(These were made, or something, shot maybe, ugh, on Fuji Super HR 100 [fig 1], "Official film of World Cup 1990, Italia", which I think lends them an air of solemnity! The film was intentionally over-exposed, according to the camera's ideas of normal or correct exposure that is, to try and compensate for the rather large gap in expiry and shoot date, the photos were taken a few weeks ago, Jan 11, expiry was Jan 92 [fig 2]. Maybe I should have waited another year for another corridor and another light... there, that seems like something a photo-blogger would type about)

Fig 1
Fig 2






Until our coordinates converge again dear (fictional...?) reader, I remain an Inhabitant of Space, for you.













[Silence]