My
love of excess, chaos, viscerality and involvement with the viewer
leads me to create moments that are desirable and indescribable to be
read on a gut instinct which just feels right and just is. I try to
create moments that I describe as ‘candy everybody wants;
from
hand to mouth like a Chinese rock garden’ that contains its
intellectualization in many layers on many levels but sustains a
prolonged gaze and focus allowing the viewer to be just in the moment,
suspended. I aim to provide a moment of instant satisfaction
and
gratification that absorbs you and occupies all senses.
My practice involves questioning value and what I as an artist can
provide. Coming from personal experience and travels, my videos,
drawings and installations employ psychology to question reality by
confronting the audience about value and experience through humor. I am
interested how the humor I use within my practice is read across
cultures and how the absurd translates differently within one culture
and across many.
Andrea
Fraser’s says in her essay How to Provide an Artistic Service
We
are always already serving. Studio practices conceals this condition
by separating production from the interest it meets and the demands it
responds to at its point of material or symbolic consumption.
Because a service can be defined, in economic terms, as a value that is
consumed at the same time it is produced, the service element of
project based practice eliminates such separation.1
My work aims to generate many answers to the question Who and how does
one put a value on video works and performance?
Bourdieu talks of distinction, taste and demand of an artwork as
subject to perpetual displacement following the course of particular
struggles within the field. My practice raises questions of social
contracts between people to push the boundaries of human conduct such
as Erwin Wurm's photographs, a perfect moment contained in lush color.
I am interested in bridging communities of entertainment and art
through humor because humor gets into the subconscious of the viewer.
Freud discusses the psychology of humor in Jokes and their Relation to
the Unconscious, saying a joke is an unconscious moment allowed to
bubble up without restraint acting in the sense of enjoyment and
freedom. Freud believes wit spans the gulf between different ideas and
the pleasure of a joke is a kind of economy. Transgressional works deal
with psychological dislocation and abjection helps to explore the
psychological as an event where audiences are confronted with their own
repressed desires through a visceral experience. I look to Erwin Wurm,
Gelitin, Daria Martin and Mathew Barney’s Cremaster series
because of their viscerality, which allow viewers to watch,
delve
and be absorbed into the image and installation.
1 Alberro, Alexander
2005: Museum Highlights, The Writings of Andrea Fraser, Cambridge:
M.I.T Press P 157 |
