Highlights from the Senior Seminar
Spencer Everett
The most important thing I have ever been told about making art is that it is “less about creativity and more about solving problems'' by Jamar Roberts, resident choreographer of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. This is the primary driving principle behind my work, to diagnose a problem and follow a process of discovery through emerging solutions. For this collection of work I draw inspiration from caution, and the problem that facilitates it: fragility.
Danger is merely an illusion enabled by an awareness of the fragile nature of the body. Inhabiting a soft, penetrable, and severable shell requires sensitivity in order to maintain connectivity and furthermore the physical ability be purposeful. This sentiment surpasses corporeal concerns and also extends to mental frailty. Working with glass, I am confronted with my own fragility through the frustration and cuts that ensue when dealing with a medium prone to breaking. I disrupt the glass and it mutually disrupts my own integrity. In this way healing becomes part of the influence behind the work. Breaking the glass is an aggressive end to its utility, but through ressemblance it takes a new form and finds purpose once more. In totality the process acts as a cathartic rebirth. This is exaggerated in the work by the intermingling of collage. When an image is cut apart it is discerpted from its contextual origin, collage brings image fragments back together to form new relationships and birth new concepts.
In a similar vein of work by artists Dustin Yellin and Rebecca Ward, this collection of work employs the convergence of dimensions. The liminal space between the two dimensional and three dimensional is of interest to me. Glass and paper allow access to this space. Glass through its transparency; invisible yet voluminous. Paper through its ability to fluctuate. A simple curve or fold changes the material's dimensional play. This liminality raises questions about our own experience of dimensionality-addressing the impossible inconsistencies in the tangible truths and bodiless imposition that complicate contemporary society. How do we avoid danger imposed that cannot be seen, how do relationships reorient the way we trust, and when shouldn’t caution be abandoned to accept the damage necessary to evolve?
Piece titles as they appear in the vitrine from left to right:
Lie in Wait
A Sudden Disturbance
Snake in the Garden
Tread Lightly
Spilt Milk
The materials are: Cut out images from Women Artists by Margaret Barlow, recycled glassware, hot glue, black ink, black acrylic