Propositions

This page is for aspirations. These are some of the ideas I would like to realise through studio, curatorial and research projects. Contact me if any of these ideas pique your interest…

Looking Deeply: Solo exhibition—Based in the current exhibition on this site, this proposition explores the notion of an invisible attraction, which is a buried memory that still functions as an unexplained attraction. This invisible attract causes us to pause when something catches our attention, like these vintage photographs have caught mine. Related to Roland Barthes’ punctum, this project moves beyond the wound of grief to explore how the simulacrum affects perception. This solo exhibition would look past commonalities and collective experiences, which Iman Issa explored in Thirty-three Stories about Reasonable Characters in Familiar Places for example, to the universality of dislocation, disjunction and the tension that arises when contexts unhook from their origin, change, and become fluid. The project is not about narrativity, or even changing narratives. It is about the constant unfixed state of all narratives.

I am my own archive: Solo exhibition—Applying this statement to Foucault’s notion of the archive as a “system that governs the appearance of statements” (Foster 2002:81), how does the recycling of my own imagery create such a system? What kinds of statements are appearing as a system of this sort? Does this create a situation similar to what we experience in the recycled identities we circulate on social media or is it a liberation from that mediated entanglement? Because the logic of my practice is to reuse, recycle, and resample older work to make new work, there is a visual recursion that happens, but it has a very wide ranging scale from the infinitesimal to the infinite. A solo exhibition based on this premise would trace the oscillations in scale through the work, and theoretically examine how ‘being my own archive’ relates to Foucault’s statement.

Dialectical Syntax: Museum research—It’s one thing to make lots of individual works based on looking in the museum, but what would it be to focus on one painting or object in the museum to create a syntactical cycle of images? What I mean is, a whole group of interrelated images that would start to read as a narrative—a new narrative based in dialectical seeing where past and present collide to create new meaning.