Solo Exhibition (Installation), 2018, College of the Ozarks
Mixed Media Drawing and Other Materials
My show, Somewhere Over the Bifrost (Critical Mass), ruminates on consciousness and its horizon. I have chosen to illustrate how personal meaning can be created from a variety of tangential epistemological content and contexts, experiences, memories, and subjective impressions of the world. I have therefore structured this exhibition as an installation wherein the viewer in the gallery exists within a mind, caught between the mind/brain dichotomy, between creativity and analytic structure, and between competing narratives. This exhibition will then show how a person's subjective impression of the world can in reality be a horizon of human becoming.
Yet this reality is also able to be apprehended. For this exhibition at my alma mater, College of the Ozarks, I chose to center the show around the conceptual implications of drawing as a means of approaching and apprehending the underlying structure of being. As both a challenge to myself and an economic necessity in light of the evolutionary scope of project, I decided that the exhibition would develop as an organic installation using unframed drawings. Taking inspiration from my on ongoing series “Figure Studies”, I chose to evolve my drawing practice by radically expanding its potential scope. The result was a stream of consciousness and conceptually uninhibited series of mixed media works, taking the figure and its potential as its liminal starting point. Ultimately I discovered and anchored my drawing process deeply in an embedded mythopoetic structure, found in the Venus of Willendorf Paleolithic form, and representing a totemic embodiment of ancestral memory of our hunter-gatherer origins and aspirations, and our human potential for fertility, a fleeting glimpsed rainbow bridge across time felt in the human soul. About 300 drawings were created and exhibited.
“More strange than true. I never may
believe
These antique fables nor these fairy
toys.
Lovers and madmen have such
seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that
apprehend
More than cool reason ever
comprehends.”
Theseus in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
