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2011 A.i.R. Entry Show
July 21st - August 26th, 2011
My work deals with the desire to keep others from harm, the limitations of our ability to do so, and the systems of thought and shared patterns of wishful thinking we engage in to increase our sense of safety.
Some of these paintings depict stories about rescue that I gathered during interviews with disparate community members. The paintings playfully reframe the stories of crisis to mimic their verbal retelling as personal mythologies, fairytales with the teller as hero.
Relatedly, I make drawings of Rescue Devices – machines that purport to solve unsolvable problems. Following a series of frustrating experiences with the aid industry, plus a handful of instances in which I was unable to ease the pain of people I cared about, I became interested in fantasies of instant gratification solutions. The devices are rueful, pathetic jokes about suffering we’re powerless to prevent.
The prints of cities use photographs of the rust belt, specifically Detroit and Cleveland, as source imagery, as well as graphically represented information relating to the practice in economics of measuring value of life according to the amount spent on devices to ensure safety, such as bicycle helmets, seatbelts, or vaccines.
I also illustrate my prayers, which I see as similar to the rescue devices in that they’re an earnest gesture toward changing what I don’t have the power to change.
My recent work is an illustrated narrative of a creation myth about my own philosophy towards art making. This book, entitled FLF, is written from the point of view of a man named Kevinator. The book works as a posthumous account of Kevinator’s final months after a large explosion traps him in the place of his employment. Symbolically, it is a parafictional and metaphorical account of my two years of graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Set against a post-apocalyptic landscape, this tale describes the adventures of a man, conveniently named Kevin, dealing with his own issues of fear and inspiration while battling his new environment, where he is seemingly the sole inhabitant. Renaissance engraving, pop culture, autobiographical accounts, and science fiction form the inspiration for this epic tale.
The illustrations for this work are produced by means of copper and wood engraving. The technique of engraving was historically used in the documentation of sculpture, jewelry, and in the reproduction of oil paintings and frescoes to a wider audience. Engraving employs the carved line to reinterpret a work of art. After the image is incised using a burin, the carved material (usually copper or steel) is inked, and finally impressed into paper. The inherent discrepancies of an engraving from the original object of documentation are large. I have come to appreciate this discrepancy and hold it as a metaphor for the subjective quality of memory as well as the seeming impossibility of true objective documentation.
An invented language accompanies the illustrations in this text. This language, called Rungish, is a written dialect of English created for those with a distrust of language’s inherent ability to disseminate and demystify. This language demands an empathetic collaboration that bears a striking similarity to the relationship I seek in speaking through images. It seeks a slower and more reflective read as a method of reestablishing trust in the mutual responsibilities of communication for author and reader, artist and viewer.
Steve Snell
As an artist, I use my work to navigate and experience both the physical and mediated reality in which I live. I like to call this practice adventure art and use the term to describe a performance-based action in which I explore my reality through some type of physical adventure, search, quest, or challenge. These adventures are then transformed through newspaper articles, oil paintings, storytelling, televised ‘news’, manipulated videos, and assemblage installations. They attempt to engage others and myself at both at the physical and mediated levels, reconciling, confusing, and merging the real with the simulated. Adventure art is an effort to construct a mythology within consumer culture and media based reality. I try and live my life as though it were a movie, or at least present the image that it is.
Eric Kocher
The role of poetry, in my own life, is suspended somewhere between mitigation and aggravation. On the one hand, poems can offer solace; they can try to make sense of things by illuminating the miracle of the mind’s hard work. This is when we feel we have been brought closer to the world through language—closer to language, even—and that, contrary to any of feelings of solipsism, poetry can bring us much closer to one another. On the other hand, poems can seek to intensify experience; they can pick at the scabs and poke at the wounds of our consciousness. These are the poems that leave us to be with ourselves—not unlike Stevens’ “metaphysician in the dark”—by freeing us of the auxiliary, the sense of familiarity, the little bridges we don’t even know we’re crossing until they’re gone. I think this is what George Oppen meant when he said that poetry is a “test of sincerity,” that poetry should never let us off of the hook; it should never be a form of avoidance. My own work—I hope—always refuses to look away, is pushing outward in both directions, like fire in pursuit of more fire, that moment of creation in which we are completely and utterly destroyed.
Opening Reception photos
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