19 May – 9 June 2012

Conical 

This project layered introduced texts with existing signs in the space, through a process of drawing on the language of culture as materiality, and the continuous production of new texts.  This project proposed an addition of texts, a process of interweaving as the etymology of the word suggests. This intertextual approach opened up a dialogue with the space as text to create tensions, harmonies and inclusivity around our writing of signs; the process of signification itself became transparent and active.

It included a series of texts: sound, castings in different materials, a carving, a photograph and a printed text object. The publication text and the found text to which the title is appropriated are also considered as introduced texts. CHI PY’S page          Text

This research is broadly concerned with the potential that representations connected to an a-priori event, image or object have for denaturalising their presumed signification. Questioning the popular understanding that a photograph is an image of something ‘that-has-been’, it proposes that while an image may provide various links to established meanings, this in itself does not confirm that something necessarily had any prior existence. Utilising photography as it is conventionally understood to capture, record, document a moment in time, something ‘that-has-been’, this study recognises meaning as chains of signification (Peirce) that simultaneously prefigure and forecast any text. It is proposing that every image has a before life and an afterlife which is both affirmed and contradicted; the representations created for this study exist in an immediacy of a reconstructed time and place that operates in the realm of signifiance; dislocating, tilting, skewing the presumed and previous links between sign and referent.

This study attempts to make transparent and yet further mythologise the ways representation is understood to convey the meaning of an experience, object or idea. It is providing opportunities for visual texts to speak of their reconstructed parts as readings determined in time and space contemporaneously to engagement with the reader/viewer.

Henceforth, 2009

Blacking out the white paper in the total darkness (a particular process) constitutes a drawing in, a pulling force, a magnetic pulse that produces a state of jouissance; the dry pigments and the wet media coming together in ecstasy. This is the state envisaged where the body is raptured in loss, the moment of visceral  incantation; the body relinquishes itself into complete (as in overwhelmed) materiality, disappearing into the wet and dry media. A longed for state of absorption; material diffusion of the body into the blackness of the marks on paper absorbed by total darkness.

[See Blacking]

[See Drawing]

Barthes: “The Pleasure of the text is just that: a claim lodged against the separation of the text and an insistence on the extension of erotic investment to objects of all sorts, including languages and texts”. Culler notes: “…replacement of the ‘mind’ by ‘body’ accords with Barthes’ emphasis on the materiality of the signifier as a source of pleasure”.

This idea that the signifier has a certain materiality that affords the reader pleasure as a kind of ‘body’ is precisely how I consider the signification in the objects and images I chose. I think of the object, whether it is a material object represented or in actual form, or a text, as a body that attempts to insist on a sensual investment in its signification. More literally I am interested in the role the body plays as a sensing being in reading the world of objects. How the body can be displaced into an object through the reading of its material qualities as a kind of erotic detournment.

On the heal of the devil, 2008

I have been thinking about individual images and objects (visual texts) and the connections they form. When Barthes states “ I await the fragment that will concern me and establish meaning for me” I sense a mild self effacement; his endless questioning of his project, and his need to keep moving, to stay ahead of doxa. When I read this I noted in relation to my own practice: these fragments may seem discontinuous yet they touch the writer in many ways. I use the term writer interchangeably here as both in the Barthian sense of the reader as the writer of the text (writerly text), and myself the writer of the words. Thus the fragments keep growing and making new meaning but never a complete meaning as once formed they somehow become incomplete, as though the intention could never be realized; the next move awaits.

For example the hair conditioner bottle as a kind of monument has yielded other connections. I think of the idea of the little monument made from an ordinary everyday object that has experienced some kind of journey and weathering. This little object is given an iconic status and a mythology that is imbued with contradiction and irony. It stands alone amongst the seaweed with the waves in the background. This idea of the ordinary object that has had its status elevated by its context and viewing angle relates to the idea of providing unexpected and multiple signifieds. Signification is disrupted by weathering and unusual typography. Thus initially it is difficult to determine what kind of ‘bottle’ it is. Its actual scale is confused by the viewing angle (camera position). And finally its context is somewhat removed from the domestic arena. Yet the irony of the beach context is fairly obvious, and thus links with the ‘normal’ signifier. I am interested in allowing this object to become something else. Though referring back to its received signifier, I am interested in the secondary signification by mythologizing this object with an elevated importance and stature. Proposing a mythology based on a reconstructed reality, one moving a couple of steps away from its doxa, allowing the reader to write a new present for this little object, to open up the range of signifieds available.

Additionally, this image, this visual text is a reflection. Where is the referent? How does this image have any relation to its materiality?

[also see Sand]

Tame, 2009

Textual production is understood as continuous and self-perpetuating, the signs keep multiplying and the different forms of text intersect, cross over, disrupt, entangle, break, fuse, converge, disperse, contradict and align. They vibrate and agitate with possibility, creating a network of signs and codes that form a body that is at once relational and removed from everyday life. He recognizes this body, observing it from a distance while facilitating the disparate connections that allow the signs to multiply and mutate endlessly; a kind of obtuse classification produced in and for its own sake.

Ecriture, 2009