Overview Rendition Tunnel Flags Egg Knots Fence
Overview
Material Reflection was a solo show installed at the Arts Iowa City gallery in the summer of 2008. The inspiration for this show began with a piece entitled "Rendition" that I completed in 2007. The strong iconographic presence of this earlier piece led me to a series of investigations into the embodiment of meaning in form. These pieces were presented together as a loosely themed installation, related more by their stance than by their content.
As an intermedia artist, I place concept over media. However, this approach does not assert, as often construed, that there is a separation between form and concept. The two are inseparable. In this series of pieces, I explicitly attempt to merge concept and form into one cohesive presence. Creating a strong sensorial engagement with form, allows the viewer to create the artwork's meaning in a way that is intuitive and visceral and maybe even sub-verbal. You can surely try to verbalize the meaning of an egg tethered by steel cable, held gently in the fingertips of a solid wood tripod, but you don't really need to. The meaning is contained in (but not contained by) the form. It is my feeling that when the meaning is thus embodied in the form it becomes extensible and universal. It allows the artwork to become an open text that facilitates the viewers' creation of meaning.