Wall Complex • Flow Chart • Pattern Seekers
December 12 – January 7, 1980
FLOW CHART (1980-81) Random bits of found information are assembled and layered; fragments of images and words, patterns, forms, markings, texts, mappings, schematics, drawings, early sprocket-driven computer readouts, string stretched over nails, pushpins, charts, graphs, prayers, advertisements, messages, ferns, and more. Dumpsters found behind commercial buildings provide the most common source of new material. A mixing of signs is explored in these images-an intertwining of ‘language games’. The cross-fertilization of symbols and meanings display a formal resolution as they unify, yet at the same time appear to go on endlessly as they flow off the edge of the frame. Intuition and stream of consciousness control the decision making process of assemblage – free flowing narratives arise as a work progresses. An aura of officiousness is maintained throughout the images, a sense of institutional use value that parody’s the ubiquitous technical rationality that inhabits our daily world. The images are visual fields of information that need to be read and considered as a text wherein contradiction is allowed between the painterly and photographic, politics and whimsy, between notions of meaning and its opposite. The work is reconstructive in nature, re-assembling broken pieces of text, image and material into new relations of reference and meaning. The sprocket –driven computer readout serves as a model for the work, in that information therein is clear and readable but incomprehensible (in code) and so it is left up to the reader to apprehend this language in any way he/she can. Meaning is dispersed and fluid in this model – understanding gives way to a ‘Tower of Babel’.
PATTERN SEEKERS (1980-81) Though still important, the carefully held formal tensions between mark and image become somewhat secondary to autobiographical and politically motivated narrative, in this series. Images like ‘Sports Page’, and ‘Emotional Travel’ reach an apex of visual complexity. Television weather reports, Iowa daily hog reports, sewing patterns, and of course language, become the material for my process of mapping. The work is playful, but often has a somewhat troubling undertone, as in the juxtaposition of sports and the military: a cynical response to a leisure culture with a vast and commanding war machine.
WALL COMPLEX (1979-80) “Wall Complex”, the first of these three series of constructivist photographs, is essentially an exploration of perspective within a visual array of assembled information. A dynamic is created on the studio wall by arranging minimal materials including pushpins, tape, string, nails, and other objects. Due to the inherent ability of the photograph to flatten space, these materials are always one with the wall they are assembled on – its geography becoming part of the formal construction. Nails, shadows, drywall seams, etc., are embellished with scratches made on the surface of the negative, and drawn marks, words, and acrylic paint on the surface of the print. The photograph becomes both image and surface – simultaneously a picture and an object to be marked upon. The work is painterly, and investigates the borders between the syntax of photography and that of hand marks. These pieces are as much forms of painting and drawing (at times even sculpture) as they are photographs, and indeed seek to break down the borders between media.
