Reflecting on what I’ve explored this year so far. Really have enjoyed pushing myself out of my material comfort zone, from behind a computer making simulations to exploring new materials and locating my Site and thinking about what Agency means to my practice. To begin I need to go back in time and reference my earlier work from Exposure 2019. A 3-D sculpture monolith installation with sound and light, a still fragment of compressed time, juxtaposed against an ocean in flux, the eternal within the temporal. Using light as material and drawing from the Light and Space movement, artists such as Ann Veronica Janssens, Helen Pashgian (image) and James Turrell, artists who utilized technology from the aerospace field to render their objects, with a focus on perceptual phenomena, where light becomes the material, via glass, neon, resin and cast acrylic, often forming installation works. Objects of light that pushed beyond the material of an object and became about the immaterial atmosphere of light itself.
Helen Pashgian
NEW LENSES AND SPHERES
VITO SCHNABEL GALLERY - ST. MORITZ
JUL 16 - AUG 31, 2019
Reassessing my own process I noticed a correlation in my own practice, where they utilized aerospace technologies, I had been utilizing visual effects software to generate intangible atmosphere, natural phenomena, finding ways to articulate and render into sculptural form the processes of nature. A somewhat mediated view of nature, although the works are based off real world statistical models and mathematics of water. In terms of Agency what interests me as an artist is the tension between real and the digital, so much of our reality today is half digital hallucination. Part of my interest in utilizing technology to generate these objects, is the relationship between myself and the computer, withdrawing my agency and ceding of control by the artist to an autonomous system.
Responding to Site, my aim was to bring the oceans memory into the gallery setting. Casting a resin wall sculpture the is a partial incomplete form,
This year I’ve pushed myself out of that comfort zone to explore these ideas through a physical material, (video)one in which I can interact with in a tactile way. Also not having the time or finances to create an ocean simulation sculpture, asked me to explore new content and form. As an artist I’ve always been fascinated by glass as a material, which like resin, transmits, reflects and absorbs light. It’s has a multi dimensional quality that appeals to me.
Have been rethinking how Agency relates to this new process and material, drawing some interesting ideas from the paper, Playing with clay and the uncertainty of agency. A Material Engagement Theory perspective, Paul argues that:
“In this paper, I describe how close attention to the process of sculpting clay from the perspective of Material Engagement Theory (MET) can create a detailed description of a mutable sense of agency and sense of self….
I assumed that creativity was explained by the mapping and manipulation of internal conceptual spaces. And I held agency to be the triumph of mind over matter…
Now a sculptor who works with clay I find these information processing models of the mind incompatible with the process of making. Sculptural forms seem to arise directly from the interaction between my body (eyes, arms and hands) and the clay. It feels like the clay and I create something together.
As a response to Materiality, riffing off of Kate Newby I began investigating Render Me, a digital shoreline. I went back to the site that has inspired me, Oruaiti Reserve, Breaker Bay, that I locate in my practice. Recording with video and observing the natural phenomena and the processes of nature, between the ocean and the foreshore. Noticing that the patterns of deposited sand and pebbles on the shore are the results of wave action by which current move sand and sediments, particles being held in suspension. Researching this sparked the idea of broken glass as material, being similar to the deposited sediments. I had seen broken car glass along the ocean road, behaving in the light like the water over the sand, and then sort out about finding how to get my hands on some. The material is set free from its intended use and is framed within a new context, removed from its former meaning of car glass and transformed.
Back at the test space after fossicking through broken glass and dog poo at the car wreckers, this interaction with the material started me thinking about the motion of waves and how it would deposit these pixelated pieces of cubed glass. Studying my research videos taken at the site of water moving around a rock, (video)
I began trying to simulate the motion of the water at the test space. Using my own agency, as if the glass had been deposited by an invisible ocean around the architectural pillar of the Site. Trying different methods to structure the glass, I found that a broom was the best way to organize the forms Into organic simulated like sediments. At this point also becoming aware of my own agency and material engagement theory from the paper playing with clay and the uncertainty of agency. Agency has long sought to be a triumph of mind over matter and the writer argues that sculptural forms seem to arise directly from the interaction between your body and the clay. That the active forming of a material opens the boundaries between what you think to be yourself, it becomes “…uncertain and permeable through the very act of interacting with the medium. The medium becoming an extension of your mind. “That sculpting can be used in an Investigative manner As a tool for material conceptualizations.”
For our response to Agency, (image) is an oil painting titled Eulogy that reflects on to the aftermath of the bushfires in Australia in 2019 the fires combined with the death of my father being rolled into one. This brings up issues around climate change and politics for me, the politics around our shared complicity in this complete devastation. A wasteland of ash, a emotional Response not a literal depiction. Reminiscent of both Rothko and Monet, Turners skies, for warnings of the industrial revolution. “Issues around social inequalities that fire present.” Speaking to an ambiguity around the foreground and background, are we looking from a forest into the light or is it ash hovering amidst the darkness. A void, a questioning of self. One of my fellow students mentioned it being like a recorded memory before it’s disappeared. Much of my previous paintings explored memory and I think it’s showing up here also if subconsciously. The textural paint seems to be pulling the image out. A tenuous bond between the site, electric sockets and lighting, in collaboration with the material. Reflection of a memory? A cry in the dark for all the flora and fauna that burnt in these fires.
Resonance, waves, frequencies, the reverberation of sound, piano vibration.
I often find a painting begins as an emotional response to music or an event, that while I may try to create what I have in mind, the relationship with the paint has it’s own voice, I’ve learned to let go of making the painting what I intended and letting the material take partial Agency I kind of surrendering.
“Here is how Francis Bacon attributes agency and creativity. BI foresee it in my mind, I foresee it, and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint… I don’t know very often what the paint will do and it does many things much better than I could make it do.”
looking forward for the next semester, I’d like to continue the pixelated glass works with projection mapping and sound for immersive installation. Working with a friend to generate AI soundscapes in conversation with a digital ocean.
