Finding the Balance

With my final on Friday, I have decided to use this weeks blogs entries to help organize my thoughts. Though on looking back at my first attempt, “Kitsch and Art,” I was struck by how unorganized my thoughts seem, this late in the game. So Today I have decided to look back and think about what I have been working on in the recent past and how it connects to the work I am doing this week.

This week is the May Final review. Graduate students have two reviews, one at midterm, and another at final, in which graduate students present their work. What work do we present is a question of some debate. Should we have completed two distinct groups of art, one for midterm, one for final? Is the midterm work a preview of the final or should it be separate and complete. At any rate, once you have decided what to show, your work goes before the entire faculty, and there are additional hurdles to overcome. The main one being candidacy, where the graduate students work is deemed acceptable to form the nucleus of a thesis body of work. Once candidacy is completed the graduate student is theoretically invited to work towards the completion of the MFA degree.

Midterm can be a very frustrating experience, and my March midterm review was even more so because I had decided to try for candidacy, which was rejected. The exact reasons for rejection are usually spelled out in forms provided to the graduate student.



My midterm works dealt with forms that simplify the objective reality of painting in order to reveal the immediate geometries underneath. The strong linear and geometric elements recall movements Like De Stijl and Constructivism, However these similarities differ in that, De Stijl while once drawing its inspiration from the natural world, ultimately turned it back on nature, and Constructivism based their works on mathematical and mechanical models, while I seek to explore the meditative, if not precarious balancing act reflective of the psychological chaos and rational order inherent in making art, and not an ascetic sensibility bent upon a machine idiom, but one capable of inventive, even playful, variations with clearly articulated parts. Nevertheless, these works are largely experimental, and I will often move through several forms before settling on a single iteration. In short, I see the freedom from mathematical certainty and spontaneity of nature resident in each piece.

Working with the material building block of art, the line and the surface, is as open and dynamic as nature itself, "Imperfections" in nature's creations are not mistakes, they're fundamental to her process. They are how she does her work-- if not for errors in the replication of DNA we wouldn't even exist. Attempts to quantify nature defy us, as there are significant aspects of reality that will never be adequately described by any formal symbolic system. Hence I avoid any direct reference to representation, and work with simple materials and imperfect construction. Thus my work, like nature, is open-ended-- driven by process, not by goals or events.

Alas the work was deemed “too minimal” for most and my defense was criticized as being “too defensive.” But the interesting thing about the work was the element of balance, and it was the part of the work that I found both intriguing one the one hand, and needing further examination, which ultimately gave rise to the pipes that hover in air (see my blog entry on Kitsch and art)