Another Statement

My current phase of work started as a direct result of interaction with my students. In observing their struggle for identity and making sense of symbol system manipulation, I found a need to explore my own uneasy relationship to language and self and, in this, study various systems of self in philosophy. I used text in an attempt to view the boundaries of text and experience.

My drawings of the recent past render actual (or perceived) morphemes (which are the smallest grammatical unit of language) or partial phrases. These language units are isolated and offered in a way that further separates the viewer from the signified, such as reversed, mirrored, flipped. The separation is never complete, though. In creating language, we define and form boundaries around this amorphous experience of perception. The human drive is to constantly expand our comfort and define experience in symbol systems, containing as much as possible in its umbrella of Unity and in this contain experience in the boundaries of language. My intent is to give the viewer language in its partial form, at the inchoate place where our given meaning to the drawn symbol falls between representing an abstract concept or a concrete object.

The question is whether we experience our environment-our Place-outside of language and symbol systems. This past work attempts to give reference points for a relation to Place. Place is what is directly in sensory experience, what immediately surrounds. Place is not what we ultimately experience. Flooded in language, language as all, of the simulation, we live a virtual existence, determined to be fundamental rather than a fabrication of our social structure and which bypasses the physical nature of existence for our abstracted nature.