DIALECTIC OF PAINTING
The making of images is by nature, both a statement and an invitation to discourse. At best, the discourse proposes complex dialog and analysis of personal beliefs. At worst, the dialog ends quickly, as with a "one-liner".
Juxtaposition is a common modern device to create tensions of multiple ideas or conflicts in a confined arena. In juxtaposition, even a representation of a tree is charged with meaning and iconography.
One of the most primal functions of the human mind is to recognize and create patterns. Everything we perceive is immediately analyzed using pattern recognition. What does it look like? What does it smell like? Why is it here? And on it goes until enough data is gathered to satisfy our analysis and relationship. When we encounter unusual patterns, or, in the case of images, representation of disparate elements, we are confronted with an additional primal response to exterior stimulus; Fight or flight. In the context of the art gallery, we can choose "Flight" and turn up our nose at an image, without further analysis, and walk away; or pause and consider the image before us, affording our mind's natural associative processes to make a sensible supposition or even a general conclusion. This process is supremely important to the development of our minds and to our deeper understanding of the social structures we live in. The amazing ability of the human mind to integrate and relate new experiences, no matter how surreal or unsettling, into broader understanding and inclusion into our now expanded experience, results also into additional considerations of experience we have already categorized and saved from our past. This suggests that each "new" experience not only adds to our collective knowledge, but actually affects all of our knowledge with the potential to affect and even modify our episteme, our fundamental understanding and 'a priori' on which our very identity is formed.
It is critical to be mindful that the suppositions we make are predicated completely on our mind's database of experience, built on our episteme, beliefs, and categorized choices. Herein also exists the inner call for dialog with others, to compare relative analysis, and possibly modify and expand our critical thinking, life experience and social skills, to evolve our shared identities and relationships.
This, I believe, is a fundamental function of art, and identifies art's integral necessity in the development of society and cultures.
DEFINITIONS
MIMETIC;
1. : IMITATIVE
2. : relating to, characterized by, or exhibiting mimicry
MEME;
1. an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture
CONUNDRUM;
1. : a confusing or difficult problem
In the representational aspect of my work, I use subjects from daily culture that I find are steeped in multiplicitous meanings and juxtapose a small set to create a dissonant mental space for contemplation of the underlying foundations of those meanings. Since this is ultimately a personal and subjective space, each work in its totality represents epistemological decisions fundamental to each viewer. My hope is to expose the cultural influences into a dialogue; to create a path to equanimity.
Sylvain Chamberlain
