MAIN SPACE EXHIBITION
JANUARY 10 – FEBRUARY 1, 1992
RECEPTION: FRIDAY, JANUARY 10, 1992 AT 8 PM
ARTIST TALK: SATURDAY, JANUARY 18, 1992 AT 8 PM
LOCATION – STRIDE GALLERY
722, 11 AVE S.W, CALGARY, ALBERTA
EXHIBITION TEXT
This work is new to me. Rather than arriving at the statement that represents completion, I invite the reader of this text to engage in the flow of thought and sensation I experience while making and reading these works.
LOOKING
In looking, there is a desire to enjoy/experience light, form, colour, and tactility.; in essence, the pleasure of constructing or examining our personal interests through visual stimulation. Images have particular capability to enhance the visual pleasure of looking through some form of recognition. With this in mind, I have begun to examine images that are of interest to me. The presence of images in these works are ephemeral. They appear and disappear as interruptions in the steady visual rhythm of manufactured corrugated cardboard, as fractures in a field of uniformity. The point of reference is the field – this undulating field where the images become the pause, trip, stumble, the fracture of rhythm, the folding and pressing of corrugations.
RECOGNIZING
There is a sensuality of pressing corrugations: a mark left, a sign of presence, the pleasure of activity. As one becomes engaged and seduced by the activity, one loses the ability to see the image in its entirety, its wholeness, as the complete and enclosed subject/object. In its completeness, an image becomes an experience of individual recognition based (debased_ in a larger cultural context. Our individual recognition of an image may therefore become an activity that (re)arranges cultural experience through the malleability of memory, historical allusion, and personal instances/experiences/relationships. It is with attention to this malleability that the images have been photomechanically extracted from their source and re-projected into/onto another ground: remade. This re-projection is less an issue of replacement than an attempt to reinvest/reinvent/reconstruct our individually derived experience to find the imaginative place and time in which images become/appear to make sense, to become recognizable.
POSITIONING
The movement and/or positioning of a viewer determines the activity within the work. There are degrees of presence: our presence by proximity, by ‘point of view’, by preference. This work depends upon the banality of cultural imagery, of alternative materiality, and neutered context. The images are removed from the context of colour and scale, set up in a neutral field, decontextualized. It is through ‘distance’ that we can construct the image. The closer we look, the less identifiable the image, the more recognized a presence, an activity. We create the context for the work and reveal our own cultural, historical, personally controlled history. It links the “distance” of cultural practices with individual presences and participation in constructing cultural events. The work speaks of the cultural “currency” of images, the cultural presence, and focuses on the newness of context in which images are viewed. Through presence we relate/identify activity, recognize, and actively remake works. In this manner, my work has become more a call for imaginative personal engagement in the activity of making, creating, and receiving than a critique of established moves of perception, ordering, and interpreting.
As I continue to work in this, I think of these things and others.
-Jeff Norgren, 1992
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