“What distinguishes self-reflexivity from mere self-reference? And foremost, who materializes his thoughts and actions, so to speak, and stores them in his work? Or is it the work ‘itself’? Can paintings, sculptures, or installations ‘think’?”<em>
The 2013 project assesses Peter Geimers comments, in Thinking Through Painting, and looks to build a mechanism within the painting process that can question the mediums capacity to store information. The work aims to challenge paintings ability to store its own materiality and in doing create a visual system. A layering of materials that expand an apparatus of self referential information.
The work looks to navigate between the display of visual information and its application. These two components are the sites of storage within painting: motif and subtext. The bracket motif became a process of visual note taking that boiled down the complexities of compositional display. This became functional within the paintings, helping to build a self-concoius mechanism, subtext, that could investigate simple elements of visual formation aiming to open out the physical language available.
The motif also references linguistics helping enhance the notion of communication that was becoming important within my work. Parentheses became a device that illustrated the complicated dualism of display in terms of internal content and external application. Content and context, motif and subtext. A visual language that is built through a motif that symbolises paintings ability to construct, store and crystallise information both physically and symbolically.
The work becomes self-aware of the hermeneutic language of a painted object both in its process of construction and its symbolic referentiality. The paintings highlight their own capacity to store information in two distinctive forms of display allowing an architecture to be built across the series.
