Abstraction and Representation 2006 | Exit Gallery
‘Abstraction and Representation’. When I use abstraction in this way I mean it in the traditional narrative sense “take out of; extract: remove, summarize”. Not in the way it is used in visual arts when used to describe abstract art, “art that does not attempt to represent external, recognisable reality”. That is because I am interested in narrative and the real, such as realism, modern realism, neo or new realism and the new subjective realism that Jean-François Lyotard is calling the 'nostalgic sublime'.
I am interested in artists like myself whose practice is informed by material culture and everyday life. Art that presents a heterogeneous world unified and organised into an aesthetic experience. In how contemporary art that is informed by cultural vernacular becomes once more removed from its origin --- in other words abstracted. As objects are taken out of, extracted, removed, summarized, from their original context and then, reproduced, refabricated, refashioned under the artist’s own terms. They become for the purpose of my working hypothesis an abstraction of an abstraction.
I am interested in artists like myself whose practice is informed by material culture and everyday life. Art that presents a heterogeneous world unified and organised into an aesthetic experience. In how contemporary art that is informed by cultural vernacular becomes once more removed from its origin --- in other words abstracted. As objects are taken out of, extracted, removed, summarized, from their original context and then, reproduced, refabricated, refashioned under the artist’s own terms. They become for the purpose of my working hypothesis an abstraction of an abstraction.
