GO NUCLEAR Wired Magazine Jun, 2008., pg 150-1.

Along with images from the upcoming show, I will also post relevant imagery to visually explain why I've chosen this particular approach. Also, the visual compendium will display the coordinates of how I see myself in the historic art/cultural slipstream, and provides a starting point for further discussion, or essay.

Here, a magazine uses words and imagery to push a message about environment and politics. The use of words and their placement impends an argument equally as effective, if not more so then one simply reliant on visuals. The addition of words adds another planar field for the viewer's consideration. This method of depicting images will be used in a series of four drawings on vellum.

In addition, this advertisement functions as a ready-made, a contextual marker in art history; comrade Duchamp, thank you. The blog Two Coats of Paint, a blog by Sharon Butler, ran a post entitled "Artists are at their most canny and resourceful when backed—or painted—into a corner" it can be found: Here. In this article two thing struck me. The first relates to my show's subject, theme, and technique. Bulter quotes Artforum writer Colby Chamberlain in saying, "Arguably the two key artistic inventions of the twentieth century are abstraction and the readymade." Chamberlain goes on, "The two inventions have on occasion converged but remained distinct. In the twenty-first century, however, artists have begun to treat the history of abstraction itself as a catalogue of styles open to appropriation. In short, the readymade devoured abstraction whole."

For myself, I found these two processes wrapped together for the duration of the thinking, planning, and construction phase of my work. The second notion that struck me upon reading Chamberlain via Butler is: "The secondhand status of a readymade sunders abstraction from its aspirational and emotive content, whereas the uninflected appearance of an abstract painting curbs the readymade’s penchant for mischief. (To this day, nothing accommodates the definition of 'art' so comfortably as stretched canvas.)" It occurred to me that anything can be subverted, then reappropriated as the subject matter of art. And if the ready-made is in fact in tension with the context of the stretched canvas, then the idea of the field may act as the vacillation between paintings placed in a gallery and the appropriated space outside of the institution's gallery walls.

The ready-made space of the Morean Fields will be at the center of my current visual work. I plan to understand my internal, pychological space as an artist by relating the safe place of my visual wanderings and ponderings out in the open. My transparency is mirrored in my choice of materials. I chose basic, classical, and academic materials to transfers my images: Vellum. The drawing's translucency is hyperbolical of the transparency so my organizations strive in perpetuity to achieve in arts communities. The work is bold, with tight dark fonts consisting of lines drawn in graphite, which juxtaposes the landscapes in the background. The difference between the light landscape constructed behind the font gives room to an absence. This lack between the words and imagery is consistent through all four images, and composes the focus of this series and others to come.

Timm Mettler