Body of work: Potential Disasters, minor upsets and small victories.
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Potential disasters, minor upsets and small victories examines the creation and manipulation of intellectual space.
Individuals create this space when provided with only partial information describing a sequence of events leading to a final outcome. A viewer creates this space when presented with a situation that indicates a change in state has occurred or is about to occur. This intellectual space fills the void left by missing information about the Event. The nature of the conclusions drawn in this intellectual space is influenced by how the subject is presented to the viewer.
Tabloid headlines, FrontPage pictures and heroic glorification help to shape public perception of events occurring around them. In accordance, documentation of an event relies upon the deliberate handling of point of view, viewer placement, scale and context to captivate and elicit an intended response from the audience. The communicable potential of a situation determines its relative significance.
Potential disasters, minor upsets and small victories applies theses ideas, imposing significance through devout attention to a series of innocuous subjects. It is not the subject itself, but the series of events surrounding its present state that is cause for its significance. The viewer finds themself seeing the beginning or end stage of an equally potential cataclysmic or minor Event. By their very existence the paintings allude to the fact that they depict a significant Event.
The subject's portrayed state alludes to that momentary yet ultimately significant instant when the Event occurs. The allusion to that fleeting moment draws it out and imbues the Event with importance. The temporal nature of the Event achieves an invisible presence, awkwardly sitting forefront in the viewers' minds. It is not what is seen, but what is not see that occupies their intellectual space.
Borrowing techniques used by the media, appropriate scale and viewpoint were considered to influence viewer perception and creation of their intellectual space and the ultimate conclusions it contains.
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