Abstract:
My aim is to disrupt a self-imposed injunction against my aesthetic predilections. The directive was a response to my sense of the overarching disapproval of Modernism to the ‘colourful and decorative’; a perception originating in my presiding child-awareness of adult colour ‘aversion’ and preferences for ‘plainness’. I begin to unpack the psychological and cultural substructures of my tacit resolution, not for a dialectical position but for oscillations of binaries. Continuing explorations incepted with my project of last year (‘One of These Things is Not Like the Others’), I extend my formal resolution from the pictorial to the spatial. I evoke a hide and seek game of relations through perceptual ambiguity, intent on representing Walter Benjamin’s ‘world essence’. The associated text is not smooth sequential exposition but a series of aphorisms that inform an organising idea. Just as the images and objects of my installation (‘Here is Where I Am’) are ‘stacks’* of other images and objects crossing to and fro between picture plane and space, this project draws links across multiple conceptual layers. I consider: how we orient ourselves within social and psychic space in our current digital environment, alongside correspondent concerns of the ‘Machine Age’; Caillois’ ‘assimilation to space’ and ‘hysteria’ as of the protagonist in Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’; and I revisit the ‘aesthetic’ room while proffering a ‘room’ as psychic space. In respect to the physical installation constituents some: conflate Modernist materials with contemporaneous Kitsch; are coated with a ‘deceptive film’ of rubberised automotive paint and simulate the colour-qualities of exotic insect carapaces.
