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By cranking the wheel electricity is generated to light the interior of the viewer revealing a magnified icon of a traditional demon. |
For the past three years, I have focused on interpreting aspects of human psychology through the practice of kinetic assemblage. In Coping Mechanisms (August 97), objects were constructed to illustrate the various behaviors relied on in times of stress. They, like many of our responses, were built as awkward, illogical solutions to the problem at hand, their specificity refined to a point of isolation. In Apparatus, (July/August 98), I explored Western culture's relationship with death through an examination of the various devices found in amusement parks. Each assemblage in Apparatus represented a simple mortality circuit. Engaging these works would close the circuit, providing the viewer access to their own personal mortality code. There are two conceptual/aesthetic threads that link these works; they are the liberation of the machine and, the tyranny of the new. The former relates to my interest in freeing the mechanized object from the confines of utility toward the realm of the surreal—allowing the machine to express the ephemeral, the random, the bizarre. The latter refers to the capitalist detritus that is the raw material of my work—the tyranny of the new propels consumption and in effect separates us from our past. I am currently exploring these two notions in an examination of our fluctuating relationship with beauty. While often considered subjective, beauty is in fact, contextual in nature: the eye of the beholder is open to influence. In the natural world (the tree, the flower, the newborn) the possibilities for influence are narrowed—nature is fundamentally beautiful; but as creation enters the realm of the human, our perception of beauty gains complexity, opening it to the impulse of context. |
