Lacuna: Mind the Gap
I am interested in nothing, literally. How do we deal with nothing? What does nothing mean? Where does it exist and how does it affect us? I believe we naturally want to fill it in. To be cliche, an empty space is not empty, but full of possibilities and potential. Language, for example, fills in silence and blank pages. Words themselves are empty of a true representation; they simply remind us of previous moments, associations and concepts that we stitch into something meaningful. Nothing allows for mental breathing room.
In my work I play with text, layering words one on top of another. I begin with one word and overlay it with similar terms, which are primarily taken from thesauri. I do this to experience and test the disconnection between a word and what it stands for. The layered text becomes an empty space surrounded by the enigmatic curves and straight lines of the Times New Roman font. These images take on physical form in various materials that I dig into, excavating and extracting the form from paper and plastic. The materials require specific actions that are unique to their density and number of layers. Like a book these words have been used before, the meaning lies between the lines, filling in the blanks.
“They will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminding.”
-Phaedrus, Plato
Memory is an ethereal psychological experience that defines us, our character, our personality. Its existence is intangible and comes to us in a layered and fractured format. The self-reflection and self-identification provided by memory is akin to the exploration of a word and its synonyms; by exploring synonyms a deeper meaning and relationship appears, clarifying the "identity" of the word, its purpose and its variety of connotations. Navigating this linguistic network related to "memory" has resulted, for me, in a relationship between: personal memories and self, the museum and metanarratives, and history and group identity. This relationship is the often fictitious and somewhat random presentation of memories (as object, record and psychological experience) and its reception as a definition.
Text is the surface of knowledge. We store our ideas, memories and opinions inside text to share with posterity. “He looked at his soul through a telescope” is a rumination on the potential outcomes of what new mediums, such as the internet, may do to that container of knowledge. The layering of memory and its accompanying 21 synonyms is a process I use in my work to explore additive methods resulting in subtracted meaning.
