Artist Statement
Allocated Area Series
I define this work as a 'photo-installation’ since each picture is displayed against an extended frame painted directly on the gallery wall. Each frame is 14” wide, which reduces the peripheral vision of the gallery’s neutral white space when viewing each image. Black was chosen for the frames, as its lack of color has the effect of pulling each image past the institutional space into a void like background. Historically, the void has been a place where new meaning is free to resonate.
The series title ‘Allocated Area’ refers to the artist being granted (allocated) a certain amount of the gallery space to claim or express a position on a subject. The larger context refers to the dividing up of property into private lots and fragmentation of the citizens into discrete consumers. The installation aspect of this photographic series attempts to critique this constraint by including the institutional wall and thus its authority.
In my view, art works consists of the form, content and the implicit and explicit meanings generated by the viewer. These parts make up what can be called the ‘ecosystem’ of the work. The titles I chose act to trigger associations in the viewer’s mind when standing before the photographic image.
My objective is to hold the viewer’s attention long enough to allow a perceptual and cognitive process to be started and then the question may emerge: “What is really going on here in this image and what is the title suggesting?”
Many of the titles have double meanings (puns) shifting the experience between the visual and the cognitive.
For example, in the piece, ‘Stripped Bare’, a saw mill’s machinery has been ‘stripped’ out of a factory building leaving behind a ‘bare’ context or lack of function. The title describes both a process evident in the picture and also social-economic implications. The title is a nod to M. Duchamp’s ‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23) or ‘Large Glass’. The dialogue is continued around the idea of fulfillment being ‘stripped bare’ by mechanical processes. Regionally, it points to neo-liberal policies that has affected B.C.’s timber industry in the early 2000s leading to increased raw log exports that led to a decline of sawmills and jobs.
For me, an effective title works like a pendulum, swinging between image & possible interpretations. It leads to the uncertainty of meaning which supports free inquiry.
The back framing device attempts to ‘ground’ the image to site and by implication the viewer’s experience. Black space revokes several references: the void, the interior of the camera and the blackness of the cave as a metaphor for the unconscious. This viewing experience becomes phenomenological, in that out of the nothingness, emerges a full color image.
The black frame as an installation device, also refers to Kazimir Malevich’s 'Black Square', 1915 - the first non-representational painting. In his statement: “Black Square is meant to evoke the experience of pure non-objectivity in the white emptiness of a liberated nothing.” inspired me to explore some of these notions. By inserting photographs into a similar ‘black square’ the intention is to create a viewing space where feeling coming for the picture is linked with a title that provokes inquiry and interpretation.
The content in this series leans towards environmental-social issues stemming from personal interests. My use of photography and its presentation is an extension of this exploration.