Ordinary Aura

This is a bitmap poster derived from a photo of the backside of a Halloween decoration (A truly psychotic screaming, flaming skull)

With our talk of surveillance cameras and grainy images perhaps also comes the oft repeated notion of "BELIEVING IN THAT WHICH IS UNSEEN"

Our prime theme for Ordinary Aura keeps asserting itself as vision itself. Looking. So, WHAT do we look at.
How do we make work that makes people aware of themselves looking?

Some ways: Work that is literally hard to see (erased drawings, pale paintings, looking through peepholes at the City of Heaven). Parts instead of wholes. Bitmap images are one way of degrading or altering. ONe idea.

I like the idea of elements that make the viewer aware of his or her own body and their interaction with the object/image before them.
What about the idea of fragments of work being displayed. Part of a torn drawing. A found painting. Discarded photographs. Those remnants, that seem to allude to something larger. Scraps of fabric. I am working on a drawing project similar to that. I will post images soon.

making the viewer aware of themselves seeing, perceiving, has been the concern of many artists, of course. the way ct puts it here makes me think of robert irwin, a pure and scary phenomenologist whose work ends up beautiful but i don't like it.

as interested as i am in perception and how it works, I grow more wary everyday of addressing such things abstractly, outside of content. same for systems-in-art. too much has been done on the structures of art and looking, not enough on how such structures are chosen, are valued. this is also where I don't think o'connor has much to say to contemporary making. i love mystery and manners to death, but the more i read it the more i don't see her advice as wholly relevant to our time...

"hard-to-see" interests me, especially when the question of WHAT/WHO makes it hard to see comes up.

i'm interested too in jered's fragments - foundmagazine, the ephemeral of benjamin and baudelaire come to mind - but I'm also thinking of one of my least favorite artists, cornelia parker. she makes relics of apparently banal materials, but we have to believe in the authority granted by the gallery for them to work. dario robleto i like a little better as a relic maker...

I am continually drawn to the idea of the tree (shaker tree and others). I think that it could be used to bridge some gaps and also as perhaps a tool of conversation. We have all these different ideas, hall of horrors, ordinary objects, etc.. We could use the tree as an organizing or connecting element. Think of it as the shaker tree, family tree, flow chart, the grid, the matrix, what have you.

yeah but the same tree doesn't bear apples AND olives. we are just kind of all throwing stuff out into the floor, and that's great, but we will need to start sweeping them into some categories, i think.

i'm not a great collaborator, truth be told. but i am good at making pieces that respond to other pieces, or to a common set of ideas.