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 was completed in 2007. The strong iconographic presence of this earlier piece led me to a series of investigations into what I refer to as the "embodiement 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 that there is a separation between form and concept (as it is often construed). The two are, in fact inseparable. In this series of pieces I was explicitely attempting 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 perhaps even subverbal. You can certainly try to verbalize the meaning of an egg thethered by steel cable, being gently held 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 meanin 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.