An End of the World/Winter Solstice/Galactic Convergence Party and Food Drive

Sponsored by Tito’s Handmade Vodka and Circle Brewing

It is here. It is over. The end. And there are only two ways out; together or alone. Come comets, come catastrophes, come cats and dogs, come hell or high water. Our calendar has finally been exhausted, the Long Count has run its course. Mere anarchy will be loosed upon the world. The center cannot hold and there are only two ways out.

You can hide away, solitary and despairing, doomsday’s rumor your only companion. But we, Ink Tank, choose each other.

We will band together, tune our radios, stockpile, set our jaws and square our shoulders, build our bunks, and welcome the community into our protective fold.

On December 21st, 2012, Co-Lab will be fortified and buttressed, made a haven and a refuge; a new Arc. We will be gathering resources to ride out the end. Any canned or non-perishable food items or supplies you bring that night be added into our community cache and will grant you entry into our safe zone, replete with hope, shelter, and a last supper. But should this foretold end not come to pass and we do survive, our vigilance and efforts will not go to waste; any and all goods received will be donated to local food banks in time for a fresh start, a new beginning, 2013.

Guest soundscape performances by Zac Traeger and Henna Chou

con·spec·tus    noun    kən-ˈspek-təs
1: a usually brief survey or summary (as of an extensive subject) often providing an overall view
2: outline, synopsis

A comprehensive look back at our 2012 programming year. Each artist or group of artists had the opportunity to transform our space utilizing it to express their ideas, now smaller components from each of these projects will be shown together illustrating the breadth and diversity of art we witnessed this year.

Featured Artists: Lisa Choinacky, Michael Abelman, Robert Jackson Harrington, Loring Baker, Jamie Panzer, Eric Timothy Carlson, Shawn Camp, Kollin Baker, Daniel Kliewer, Paul McLean, Alyssa Taylor Wendt, J Haley, Julia Hungerford and Lee Webster, Ben Brandt, Mark Johnson, Russell Etchen, Justin Balleza, Drew Liverman, Jules Buck Jones and Morgan Coy, Andrea Hyland, and Judy Rushin

An exhibition in two parts:

October 20, 2012 - October 27, 2012
Project Space (613 Allen)

October 13, 2012 - November 24, 2012
N Space (905 Congress)

The Secret Social Life of Painting is an exhibition of works in two parts by Judy Rushin and is simultaneously on view at Co-Lab and N Space. The works at Co-Lab hang on and lean against the walls and stand freely in open spaces, creating an experiential environment that Rushin sees as an extension of themes developed in the 60s by artists like Blinky Palermo, Imi Knoebel, and Helio Oiticica. Like her forerunners, Rushin allows her creative process to be intuitive and her post-creation analyses to be equally fluid. Essentially though, she reduces the elements of discourse to their most basic components to establish a space for larger and more mysterious concepts to emerge. Hanging limp or connected to one another, the paintings look for new ways to be paintings… and that’s it. No neon signs, no climaxes, no imagery, no limelight. The work exists quietly, proceeds at a slow pace, and waits patiently for your attention. While the works on view at Co-Lab create a group dynamic, the works on view at N Space focus on individual pieces.  Their statements are understated – they’re about the rigor of simplicity, not virtuosity for its own sake — but stripped of the anonymity of the group setting, they reveal an ability to speak confidently in their own right.

The idea for the show started with a conversation about the road of life; inviting the possibility of choosing your own adventure. As humans we are obsessed with figuring out what the right path may be and as a society infatuated with time we begin to question ourselves when faced with crossroads; what am I doing? Where am I going? Am I doing the right thing? However when presented with options and enticed by distractions our paths tend to change. Through an interactive/ performance I will constructs an abstract environment and create a metaphorical experience that explores the idiosyncrasies of our decision making while offering simple explanations to understand the world in its complexity.

This body of work combines performance, photography, drawing, animation, projectors, costumes, and sculpture to illustrate transformations of humans and animals into and out of each other. The work is a collaborative effort by Jules Buck Jones and Morgan Coy, both interested in ideas of transformation, and hybridization and the mythological, scientific, and spiritual bases of such actions and occurrences.

The 2012 Sketchbook Project World Tour kicked off April 14th at the Brooklyn Art Library, featuring thousands of sketchbooks contributed by artists from more than 100 countries.

Over the course of 2012, the Sketchbook Project Tour will visit 15 cities in four countries, bringing handmade artists’ books to art spaces around the world. Each interactive installation of the traveling library will draw thousands of patrons to explore the world’s largest library of sketchbooks, generating a groundswell of creative energy in communities from Chicago to Australia and among more than a million visitors online.

The Sketchbook Project is a mobile library of artists’ sketchbooks contributed by thousands of creative people from across the globe. The Project encourages artists from diverse backgrounds ― working artists, full-time parents, busy professionals, students ― to share their process with each other and the public. Participants sign up online to receive a blank sketchbook, then fill it with artwork and mail it back. The results are cataloged in the Brooklyn Art Library’s permanent collection, displayed online in the Digital Library, and exhibited at museums and arts festivals from coast to coast. The Project demonstrates the power of collaboration: When 10,000 people get together with a common purpose, we can create something uniquely awesome.

2012 World Tour
2012 Tour Stops include: Chicago, Portland (OR), Vancouver, Los Angeles, Oakland, Boston, Portland (ME), Toronto, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Orlando, Austin, London and Melbourne. See complete details here: www.arthousecoop.com/projects/sketchbookproject2012

Sketchbook Project 2013 is now open
The Sketchbook Project 2013 just opened for new participation, so that patrons inspired by the World Tour can join this worldwide creative experience right now.
Please visit us online for details: www.sketchbookproject.com.

About Art House Co-op
Art House is an independent, Brooklyn-based company that organizes global, collaborative art projects. Our flagship endeavor is the Sketchbook Project: an evolving library that features more than 18,000 artists’ books contributed by creative people from 130+ countries. We also operate the Brooklyn Art Library, our storefront exhibition space in the heart of Williamsburg, as a home for all of our projects.

Art House began in 2006 in Atlanta, GA and moved to New York City in 2009. Since that time, our small organization has grown into a worldwide community of more than 60,000 artists. By focusing on the intersection of hands-on art making and new technology, Art House nurtures community-supported art projects that harness the power of the virtual world to share inspiration in the real world.

My work deals with animals. The depiction of animals through drawing and lore is as ancient as the imagination.  The impressions and ideas they provoke range from symbolism to science.  I make large scale, 2-dimensioal drawings, sometimes bizarre and fantastic, other times simple and subtle.  All of this stems from a long interest in the natural sciences.  The work grows from thoughts and research on biological and ecological concerns as well as along narrative and mythical dimensions.

I depict my animals in various ways.  I use techniques inspired by the clear careful illustrations of field guides, through a range of expressive and abstract artists.  A lot of my work bumps representation up against its limits.  Abstraction comes into play in many ways.  At times an animal, drawn in larger than life scale will melt away into aggressive strokes of color and marks, robbing the animal of its form. Other times I assemble animals into geometric formations, or I’ll attempt to merge scientific diagrams with the myths that precede them.

My work is very much about drawing itself.  The line plays a crucial role in the development of my subject matter.  I draw with a quick, gestural, playful delivery, which I believe gives the subject a liveliness that often eludes a slower, more meticulous, depiction.  I use a variety of media from all sorts of drawing tools, such as graphite, charcoal, and wax, to different water-based pigments as inks, acrylic, watercolor, and gouache. I team lines with washes to build or negate my subjects.  I strictly work on paper, preferably larger than a person. To me, drawing has more of a romantic relationship to paper than to other surfaces, like wood or canvas.  The paper allows my pencils to glide when they move and embraces my washes in some symbiotic manner.  The grand scale creates a 1 to 1 ratio between work and viewer. Conceptually I think this is interesting and intrinsic to the dialogue between man and nature.  The scale is also conducive to the loose descriptions and allows a greater arena to suggest the infinite details nature provides.

I revel in the idea of continuing the long inscription of drawing, painting, sculpting and believing in animals. I draw inspiration from prehistoric cave paintings, totemic symbols, the great artist/naturalists like Seba, Haeckel, Audobon, and a contemporary art world increasingly more aware and intrigued with issues of the natural world.   Fact and fiction, past, present and the future, all play a role in my work. I aim to express and conjure the flesh and magic of evolution, classification, environment, bio-diversity, mutation, and extinction.

Jules Buck Jones is a practicing artist living and working in Austin, TX.  Jules was born in Northampton MA but grew up in Northern and Central VA.  He got his BFA from VCU in Richmond, VA in 2005 and received his MFA from UT Austin in 2008.  Over the years Jules has developed a body of work dealing primarily with animal imagery and thoughts on biology, ecology, mythology, and transformation.  He participated in the Austin Museum of Art’s “20 to Watch” show in the spring of 2008 and was the Artist in Residence in Everglades National Park in May and June of 2009. He has also completed 3 residencies in 2011 at the Vermont Studio Center in VT, the Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture in ME, and Buoy Gallery, ME.  Jules shows extensively throughout TX with solo shows in Dallas, Austin, and Houston.  Jules is also part of several collaborative teams practicing large scale installations and collage and is president of the non-profit project space, MASS Gallery.

The show is loosely based on Dante’s Divine Comedy using the classic work of literature as a launching point. The main themes are Heaven and Hell, with Dante representing humanity in the middle, or Purgatory. My thought is that these places or states of being are constructs of the human mind. For centuries humans have grappled with understanding the forces at work behind the world we can physically see. If there is injustice, pain and suffering in the world there must be a cause. This reason must be a combination of forces inside and outside our mortal control. We make decisions, but they are constrained by factors around us. Our environment, actions and other people’s actions combine to force what we can do for ourselves. Whether supernatural or not, scientifically explainable or not, we are caught in struggles of chaos and order, good and evil. These tendencies, however you might imagine or define them, are innate in the Universe and all life. It is the way of things - without darkness there is no light.

The show is composed of a pair of wall murals that attempt to describe these opposing forces as well as a drawing of Dante in the middle representing humanity caught somewhere between. On the one side chaos or hell is shown in a literal sense as explosions. On the other side of the gallery is order, calm and transcendence seen as a field of Lotus flowers. These visions of heaven and hell are shown through images of nature - the frightening reality of Samsara and the calm realm of Nirvana most of us visit rarely if ever.

Over the past year I have studied naturalistic drawing at the Atelier Charles Cecil Studios in Florence Italy. There we draw figures and portraits from nature using a naturalistic process of drawing called, “sight-size”. The cast drawing of Dante in the show is done using this method of drawing.

Survey/Surveil explores the visual rhetoric and psychogeography of the U.S./Mexico border through video, interactive sculpture, photography, and appropriated imagery. We have worked independent of each other, except for a few conversations, and our nature of creating and reference of experience are quite different. However, we are intrigued by and have made work in response to similar issues, in particular the construction of border identity by the public and media, notions of otherness, the land as a surveyed/surveilled space, and the game of us vs. them that is played out daily along the line.

With an understanding that vision facilitates each of these issues and functions as the chief method of control in this environment, we have built an installation that shifts the context of looking and invites reflection on what is being seen and by whom. Within the space, we also invite interaction within real and constructed situations, illuminating how seductive it is to engage in the game of watching.

Ultimately this exhibition reflects our collective effort to use art as a means to pose significant social questions about borders, ways of looking, immigration, smuggling, and modes of representation. Rather than using the work to make a value judgment, we are most interested in the installation serving as a catalyst for critical inquiry and contemplation. And through participation we work to provide viewers an opportunity to explore multiple perspectives — to watch and to be watched.

Outdoor Mural

I am interested in synanthropes- animals that thrive due to mankind’s impact on biodiversity. Urbanization has been detrimental to many species, but it has also accelerated adaptations and successful symbiosis in some animals living amongst humans. I celebrate the creative effects of our influence on nature in addition to concerning myself with the negative. Synanthrope Stations are sculptural installations equipped to accommodate the seasonal needs of urban dwelling birds. Trash infused bird nests are a common sight in cities and suburban areas, and some researches say that birds benefit from the longevity of synthetic over natural. I will process and organize various man-made materials, taken from litter, and weave it through sculptural steel and ceramic supply stations for birds. By removing trash from a site and transforming it for animal use, I am hoping to initiate other ways of looking at refuse and our responsibility to nature.

On Sunday, June 3rd, 2-3:30PM, families and bird lovers are welcome to “Think Like a Bird” with the visiting artist.  Kamin will guide visitors through a quick walk to collect litter for building their own trash nests. The workshop will also include conversations about the artist’s work, bird architecture, and identifying different species that thrive in the city. The artist will also present participants with a small gift for their nest.  No materials or fees necessary just bring a curiosity for nature!

Calder Kamin (born Austin, TX) is an artist and art administrator in Kansas City, MO. Kamin’s fabricated ceramic fauna illustrate an investigation into our benevolence towards certain species and cultural constructions of nature. Before completing her BFA, for ceramics and art history from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2009, she curated for Red Star Studios, the Kansas City Art Institute’s Ferguson Teaching Collection and off campus galleries. Kamin is a 2011-2012 Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project resident artist, and has returned to KCAI, as staff in Career Services, responsible for the development of the Professional Practice programing. She has shown nationally, and is in several notable collections in Kansas City.

The Synanthrope Station was made possible with design assistance from K. Flecksing Studios, and funds from the ArtsKC Inspiration Grant.

“All_Over” is a contemporary iteration of an ancient form, the grotto. Ambiguous in its definition owing to various uses, both artificial and manmade grottos are caves that have served as oracle temples and garden decorations. Generally, manmade grottos are created to represent their natural counterpart, sculpted environments that are embellished with statuary and artificial geological formations. The famous Buontalenti Grotto in Boboli Garden outside Florence houses a sculpted pastoral scene, encrusted with stalactites, along with Michaelangelo’s Prisoners, and landscape frescoes that provide a space for contemplation of the numinous.

The site-specific installation “All_Over”, takes as a departure point, the often-overlooked grotto-like domestic spaces of the attic and basement crawlspaces. These liminal spaces that insulate and buffer everyday living spaces from the exterior world, often serve as repositories of little-used items of storage, or house the mechanical systems that regulate the flow of air and water through the structure. These spaces often sit dark and forgotten for extended periods until either some problem with our environmental regulation system presents itself, or some occurrence outside of the daily flow of life creates the need for us to enact a retrieval operation. If a building and a body were metaphorically mapped into each other, the attic and the basement would represent the space of memory and the subconscious, respectively. This grotto presents a collapse of these two separate zones, where blown insulation will become the geologic accretions over the stored remnants of sculptures as psychological contents.

"In these works I invade the viewers space with fragmented conversations. The lost paragraphs meanings find their way to the surface through similar relationships between letters, drawings, color and texture. I try to observe events, human interactions, and personal perspectives to become more conscious of my own emotional responses and to find metaphors for experience. My findings become the phrases used in my work that are journalistic in nature and describe a universal struggle of reflection." -Mark Johnson

Ruin enthusiasm runs rampant through artistic communities. Our artists, after all, hold a proud tradition and responsibility for pioneering unwanted lands and forging new territories and vistas into otherwise discarded cultural architecture. The magic that modern culture uses to bring structure back from the dead hovers in a careful purgatory, serving both as reminders of the past and projecting us into the future. At what point do ruins become monuments and vice-versa?

In her new installation and participatory performance, Alyssa Taylor Wendt revisits tropes of urban decay, monument and mourning with a multimedia installation in the main space, using a variety of materials, including horsehair. Building large forms that need to be negotiated with, she asks us to consider the materials at hand and question their place as signifiers of both ruin and rebirth. Hairwork has been used to remind us of both the mortality within the very matter of its dead follicles, and the magical living essence of the natural world it hails from and celebrates.

The viewer will have the opportunity to participate in a live ongoing afternoon performance, in which the artist, on leave from her native New York City, will be working on a community hair wreath in the outdoor space at Co-Lab Projects. One can leave a sample clipping of his or her hair in a baggie, with the option to write something personal on a scrap of paper. The artist will use the donated hair pieces and paper to construct a living memorial wreath of hair, binding together strangers on the common grounds that they have an interest in conceptual art. The finished piece will be added to the installation and on view in its final form during the Saturday closing reception.

For more information about the artist: www.alyssataylorwendt.com

Since late September, 2011, I have been co-organizer of Occupy with Art, an affinity group of the Arts & Culture Working Group of the New York General Assembly for Occupy Wall Street. The Occupational Art School is emerging from this scenario, as a collective and individual proposition, a shared imaginary, a hyper-real construct for a 99% art world, or maybe even a 100% liberation of art, for all and from all. Its appearances are momentary, like a ghost or a shade of a memory. Fortunately, we have mobile devices with powerful still- and moving-image cameras built-in, now, and other networked “capture” devices that can virtually prove the existence of such non-things, as simulations, as they happen. If we piece enough such events together, we can build a true story that exists beyond fact and fiction, as a becoming that is also a teaching about the impossible being made possible, as art and occupation. The medium is dimensional. Time is the only Object, and everything else is the Subject. This art is for humans, and it is free. We have nothing to lose, except either/or. 

SUBTEXT IN RE-PRESENTATION [Flux BETA: these premises are continuously modified (see project tumblr)]
[1] In the End, the Hydra Kills Hercules [and the Other One] (“I Love You, Monster”)
[2] Nothing Is Transparent, Really & It Is OK [Mountain = Painted Mountain] (Matterhorn Project)
[3] Main Street Has No Dead End (Concentricity Projects)
[4] West Virginia, Blood & Bone (The Orphanage of a Refugee’s Home)

Program: The Artist will work on one image [potentially objective], creating multiple iterations, while ex-positioning or coursing amongst multiple seams of related immaterial, IRL, IRT, for the purposes of generating a documentation for digital environments. This is not a performance, nor is it installation.

Paul McLean is an artist who works in both new media and traditional fine art. His research interests include media philosophy, specifically pertaining to time and systems; arts management, art, and cultural economics; and the convergence of 4-D methodologies among military, political, business, and social sectors. His web site is artforhumans[dot]com. McLean is also a co-organizer of Occupy with Art [www.occupywithart.com].

My present work is about expressing the malleable nature of time and how the mind can alter and transfigure events in future and past parts of our lives. When I paint I often remember the steps and methods used and upon looking at the image at a time in the future, I may go backwards and deconstruct the image in my mind, in a similar way to how returning to a location might remind a person of things that happened years before and bring about thoughts and understanding that were unavailable at that time. When we remember things that occurred, like going backwards through the day’s events, I think that we recollect what was felt and experience a more conscious awareness through adding more thought and allowing emotion to be understood. Through the cultivation of thought and becoming aware of oneself I think one can gain a better understanding of time and how simple association or repetition can alter and create new time where there was none before.

In 2010 I began painting digitally using a Wacom, a pressure sensitive tablet and stylus input for a computer, and used screen capture, which records every ‘brushstroke’ of what I paint on screen. I would then edit and time lapse the video as well as altering the flow of time. From these videos I could take a painting that took 8 hours to create, condense it to 15 seconds and then reverse the video so that in 30 seconds you could see the process used in creating the image and then watch as the same image devolved and began again. While I was working I suffered a concussion and began imagining an alternate history that developed after I found an old biography of Eisenhower that had an interesting portrait on the back. I would listen to the news on the radio while painting and imagined a world in which a cybernetic artificial intelligence was created that permeated the internet and had a bodily form of an android in the likeness of Eisenhower. The android was created by the military as a computer entity that was much more intelligent that any human mind and was a last resort super weapon. Upon the activation of Cybernetic Android Eisenhower rather than launching bombs it instead used confusion and altered all the languages of the world, including the meaning of words, all communications, removing anger from voices in phone calls and preventing any sort of violence from occurring.

In order to display my digital work I have taken old television sets and modified their hardware to play digital video, as well as painting the exteriors. I have found that part of what I want to do when I make these videos which I call ‘moving paintings’ is to transform televisions into a type of ambient art. I designed my art to transform the place of a television from the centerpiece of a room to a painting hanging on the wall. I feel when our attention is enveloped by an interesting narrative or focused on hand eye coordination it becomes difficult to think our own thoughts or to relate to others in an authentic and meaningful fashion. Not to say film or games are bad when taken in moderation but when taken to extremes I feel they can become a damper on developing authentic relations or understanding oneself and can lead to isolation.

When I first began creating digital time lapsed paintings I was recovering from an accident that put my canvas work on hold until my arm could heal and was given hypnosis treatments as part of my physical therapy. I still experience the pain but to a lesser degree and I used painting with a Wacom as an escape. When I would paint I would forget my pain but I would still think and my perception of time would be different. I hope that others when watching my paintings will get to feel or experience the state in which time is altered but thought still occurs. It is that time, where I think about time or think about thoughts, and I do not feel isolation because I feel understanding and peace.

I began this project a couple of years ago, first by visualizing the usage of a common and familiar object. The second part has been the contemplation of the overall layout and design of the parts to create a “whole”.

What congealed the parts into this installation was observing my thoughts and feelings during the process. It occurred to me that visually this reminds me of our neurological pathways.

It is not that a bunch of twigs arranged around a room is that interesting to you or me, its the concepts and thought/s. I realize that is the very essence of being human and an artist. No other organism can do this, that is what differentiates us.

Our thoughts and emotions, brief. The need to express, utterly human.

Above Every Plane and Around Every Circle uses light, sound, and paint as a meditation on transmutation and recurrence.  The gradually changing environment of the space transforms painted surfaces in the work from opaque to transparent. Each cycle of light to dark is meant to further singularize the dichotomy of the two extremes, of the earth to the heavens, of day into night.

The imagery is taken from topographic maps of the Alberta prairie near where my mother was raised.  The elegance of its wintery plains, lakes, and rivers belies a true severity - the vast isolation inherent to the place and denudation from the visual blast of sunlight on snow.

Some of my earliest memories are from here: mental images of stinging, watery eyes in bright morning sun.  In those winters the darkness at night blew, biting, past tiny specs of light, like millions of needles had punched through the firmament, leaving miniature keyholes to let slip the snow-blind glare of the heavens above.  The paradox of an infinity, just beyond real comprehension but always insistent, is water beneath ice-covered rivers, flowing inconspicuously toward the lower latitudes.

The mural being produced for Co Lab Space, the second iteration of the loosely titled series “Waves of Joy – Heat Distortion – The Vague Obelisk”, is to be an immersing field set to induce a physical and emotional experience through the use of line space and color. 

Eric Timothy Carlson is and artist from Brooklyn, New York by way of Minneapolis, Minnesota, using visual physics and a vast lexicon of personal & contemporary symbolism to produce works ranging from expansive series of drawings and artist books to immersive collaborative production and installations.

The schematic for this ancient apparatus was unearthed one day when I was digging for loose coins in the dirt. I’ve reconstructed a prototype using modern materials as best I could.

That such a device existed so long ago, and is only now available to us for use, is a testament to the fact that we have always been surrounded by bullshit. I might add that it arrives in no short order.

It’s monolithic pylons serve as support for the mechanism, forming a tetrahedron, which defines the purest geometric shape in the known universe. Through restistance and impedance, bullshit is attracted, absorbed and disintagrated. Exactly how remains a mystery. Consider it to function in a way that detects bullshit of all manner, including swindles, hog wash, lies, hokum, balderdash, baloney, bilge, flap trap, hooey, poppycock, rubbish, twaddle, chicanery, fraud, malarky, crock, ruse, sham, hucksterism, snake oil, deceit, cons, distortions, dupery, mendacity, prevarication, bunk, hypocrisy, and bluster, et al.

This body of work is an investigation into my mind as a single mother. I use drawing as my main mode of exploration throughout all the facets of the work. The honest, crunchy, tactility of pencil on paper is something that speaks very clearly to me. I began this work with the idea that I should be able to examine this relationship with my son and explore its interest and beauty from endless different angles. This personal exploration of our relationship can be seen as a metaphor of the larger idea of cognitive flexibility, or our ability as humans to switch our perspective, therefore completely changing the way in which we see something. This body of work ultimately speaks of the existence of innumerable branches of possibility within each initial starting point, and our ability to see these possibilities, if we only take the time to look.

Each drawing is made from one photographic portrait that I took of my son. Seeing this as a way to examine this particular relationship from many different angles, I made drawings from pieces of the photo to create new compositions of his facial features. While drawing I recorded the actual sound of making the drawing, all the scratching, tapping, erasing, etc that my tools made, seeing these sounds as metaphors of creation, destruction, frustration, joy, hard work, while also speaking very literally of drawing. I then edited these sounds by adding small guitar or voice parts, atmospheric sounds I recorded around town, using loops, or by leaving them as is. I then arranged them into soundscapes. Each soundscape has a specific drawing that it is part of, as it is made from the particular sounds of that particular drawing.  From here, the animations further explore my interest in relationships, the act of drawing, and transformation.

My work centers on the concept of potential. The possibility of what could be as opposed to what is. This concept works as an exercise of the mind. Our thoughts take given information and imagine or project a new state of being for that information. When we consider something’s potential, usually we visualize a greater and idealized outcome. My work resides in these moments of conceptualization.

I create false narratives that attempt to exploit the idea of potential. I aim to lead the viewer to believe that my sculptures somehow “work” or perform some kinetic function or illustrate a scheme of some unknown contraption. However, the arrangements do nothing, they merely act as a stimulus or catalyst. They suggest a situation, or an action that compels the viewer to respond. I feel that the viewers projected ideas of what my work “can be”, or what it “does” is far more interesting than the actual objects themselves.

www.robertjacksonharrington.com