Sketchbook

5. General artist statement.

Dismantling order, my work is left open, which allows for the viewer to make their own assumptions. Unexpected subject matter and ambiguity unfolds through both its familiar and unfamiliar forms. Often, initially, a moment of visual pleasure is reached through its colours, textures and familiarity of the human figure (an icon); at a second glance the uncanniness of the work unravels- bringing to the surface a tension between what we know and what may be considered unknowable.

Often I aim to include disguised metaphors and symbols in the work. Such metaphors concern themselves with societal structures, how silence can contribute to violence: how when we fail to speak out for fear of breaking taboos, we enable violent circumstances to continue. Philosopher and Art Historian, Georges Didi-Huberman writes in Images in spite of al, “Indeed, it is for this entity that the unimaginable becomes so necessary.” The unimaginable here refers to taboo, violence and the unrepresentable. Huberman continues, “It is for this entity that the unimaginable becomes absolute, knows no exceptions, ultimately extends its tyranny to the 'unrepresentable',… 'invisible' and the 'impossible'…in spite of all attempted to name the act of producing these images-an act of resistance…”1

The fractured figures, repetitively present in my work, represent how shamelessly we have failed to create a discourse on violence. This discourse, however, is still possible; and it is possible to make is transgressive. A portrayal of how our social structure is not intransigent, such aims are bridged with formal qualities of my work.

I have experimented with creating spaces in which my installations play with human senses through sound, lighting, scent and space. Although the rooms and spaces I create are closed and intimate—qualities which we might align with secrecy—it is secrecy that I hope these spaces are able to deconstruct. The work should allow the audience to question themselves and their thoughts in relation to the installation. The ambiguity of the work acts as a mirror for the viewer. The experience of my work is aimed to create an internal dialogue which states, wait, stop, there is something to be seen, it is personal, it is political, it is open: an invitation to hallucinate. The internal dialogue is left open for the viewer to determine. Through this engagement with an audience, my work serves as a form of activism. Activism is reached through the dialogue which occurs after the initial attempts of thought, through discussion, through emotion, through experience.

Works Cited:

• Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of Al: Four Photographs fom Auschwitz. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2012.

Georges Didi-1 Huberman, Images in Spite of Al: Four Photographs fom Auschwitz, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 60.