EVERY NOW AND THEN
The title of the show is in itself a double entendre. Wether it means now and then or absolutely EVERY now and then is up for debate. An absolute term in a phrase meant to mean inabsoluteness establishes at least a minor internal epistemological debate.
I have been thinking about different forms of abstraction. I’ve been trying to push my work further, and in doing so it has taken things in two different directions. I work in pairs, so its fitting that this work forms a dichotomy of abstraction. There is a formal abstraction and a verbal abstraction. There’s physical objects, and there’s abstract concepts. Still between these disparate concepts there we exist, and there are many connections between the two.
To me there is this linguistic abstraction that happens when you take a word or phrase out of context. You strip it of meaning in absence of its context. Words are like Oxygen, they want to be paired with other elements. They oxidize your thoughts and if given a chance will become a part of your physicality as they relay past experiences.
Sometimes things are elusive. Reality sometimes is in the shadows, and we
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EVERY NOW AND THEN
The title of the show is in itself a double entendre. Wether it means now and then or absolutely EVERY now and then is up for debate. An absolute term in a phrase meant to mean inabsoluteness establishes at least a minor internal epistemological debate.
I have been thinking about different forms of abstraction. I’ve been trying to push my work further, and in doing so it has taken things in two different directions. I work in pairs, so its fitting that this work forms a dichotomy of abstraction. There is a formal abstraction and a verbal abstraction. There’s physical objects, and there’s abstract concepts. Still between these disparate concepts there we exist, and there are many connections between the two.
To me there is this linguistic abstraction that happens when you take a word or phrase out of context. You strip it of meaning in absence of its context. Words are like Oxygen, they want to be paired with other elements. They oxidize your thoughts and if given a chance will become a part of your physicality as they relay past experiences.
Sometimes things are elusive. Reality sometimes is in the shadows, and we can’t always be sure what’s to know. This same way the text hides within these surfaces. The viewpoint establishes the reflective surfaces in relationship to the image plane. Sometimes it is as clear as day, like when the sun is high above–yet dusk comes every day. At that point, the ocean meets the sky and they are one gradient together. The sunsets into the water and the reflection completes the solar mass just before it is gone for the day. Don’t get me started on the night…
The reliefs are all about the haptic sense. They live in a world with dimension and texture.
It all started with the idea of making a paintbrush that could record movement in more than left, right, up, and down. I made my own ‘electric paintbrush’. Now I’m going in and out with things. Words can be carved into and out of the surface, breaking the plane.
With paint, if you made a series of strokes across a canvas until the whole thing was full, you’d end up with a monochrome surface. If the paintbrush records in 3 dimensions you get a much richer history of mark making. Each stroke becomes a distinguishable span of time in space. These relief panels are a reality. They are concrete objects. They are abstract painting. They are monochromes. If one definition is good, many is great. The fact remains that despite their elusiveness of form, they still struggle to find a place in a mind’s eye. The surface only exists in light and shadow, or by touch if you’re so bold. The form only has the vaguest reference to any reality, unless your reality is the brush itself.
Statement by John Aaron Frank
