Nathalie Bouleau Chabot
When he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision, -what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them, -will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?[i]
A system has become necessary: action interrupts contemplation. The computer plays an important role in defining my practice; the “medium” of the blogosphere has opened up a space where I can focus my practice on daily writings that chronicle the process of the work’s creation. A number of fundamental questions have been raised, which I work towards answering through a series of experiments. This development is directed in equal measures at the action and its temporal uniqueness; each piece of work has the possibility to last forever, transform or be erased completely.
The fragmentary images are echoes of unread words and a translation of them is not necessarily required; they form visual patterns, or codes, which communicate the logic of language, but one that on first inspection refuses to provide an accessible denotation; as meaning, description and narrative appear to have been eliminated. By collapsing and restructuring the text, the viewer’s gaze does not become distracted, but becomes more refined, creating an active rather than passive perception.
Paradoxical qualities dominate: reveal/conceal, substance/light, fragment/whole. Through the immaterial and transparent nature of projection, an internal process is transferred in to an external world; and a transfer of thoughts and experiences can literally be cast on to the viewer. There is a battle between aesthetic values and practical realities of production, which rests somewhere between our bodily experience and our intellectual understanding of the work. How can it be absorbed, and where is it’s relevance outside of the artists thinking?
[i] Plato (1991) ‘The Allegory of the Cave’ found in The Republic Benjamin Jowlett translation: Vintage
