| Abstract | The works in my thesis exhibition ... developed from my interest in physical and psychological location and how it influences a conception of self-identity. My inquiry has shown me that locating oneself is a function of external referentiality. The relationship of the physical and mental body to outside referents, both corporeal and abstract, such as time, is the relational basis for how we view and locate ourselves (and others) in the world. The focus for me is not, as it might be for phenomenologists and psychoanalysts, a question of origination--an understanding of the self, or the perception of that which is outside the self, be it tangible or intangible to various degrees--but rather, the manner in which they perpetuate each other in a state of continuous flux and feedback. My investigation seeks, in the creation of indexical objects, to produce a cognizance in the viewer of this continuous dialogue through his perception of a momentarily reified intersection between themselves, the work, and divergent elements of space, time, and physical and cultural location, or what Douglas Crimp refers to as the "coordinates of perception." The instance of the viewer's confrontation with the physical object heightens "one's awareness of oneself existing in the same space ... establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various positions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context." In this sense, the art object acts as a phenomenological pivot point that dialectally informs a perception of one's current location and in turn positions the viewer's understanding of self in relation to the other"--P. 1-2. |
