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"ELUSIVE"

Explore the gaps in perception and understanding.

( January 7th - January 18th, 2008 )
( Reception: Friday, January 11th, 2008 from 7-9pm )

The Centre Gallery is hopeful for a promising future with their new 2008 season line-up. My opening exhibition for the year, however, is also looking to the past.

My work explores the elusive properties that are inherent to art, memory, and experience. It is my intention to investigate the constructive qualities of elusion and explore the gaps in perception, interpretation, and understanding. Through the interactive works within this exhibit, I invite the viewers to literally play and contemplate elusion in their engagement with the objects - and by extension, their engagement with life.

Exhibited will be a series of zoetropes, thaumatropes, flipbooks, and mirror portraits. These contraptions embody a child-like playfulness upon encounter, but the work's demeanor shifts from whimsical to serious as the animations yield unsettling political references. Because the works are based on interaction, the viewers cannot address the works without addressing themselves.

All of the works on exhibit are reductive in multiple ways. In some regards, this approach reminds me of Mondrian’s paintings. One gets a sense that he tried to explore the chaos of visual representation while simultaneously attempting to control it. Similarly, I also aim to control my media and bring a sense of containment to the complex subject at hand. Interestingly, the work contains dual properties of implosion and explosion as a result; through my reductive methodology, the work explodes through references and relationships outward again.

My aesthetic decisions for the works and the exhibition environment stem from Aristotle's philosophy on art: "The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."