Artist Statement: Heterotopia

“We are in the epoch of simultaneity … of juxtaposition, … of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed … Our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible.” - Michael Foucault, Of Other Spaces, Heterotopia (1967)

The advent and spread of digital technology and the resulting encoded media has altered our nature of vision and interaction within the 21st century, providing us infinite new means of envisioning the world and our place in it. This body of work explores the space of heterotopia, where a “single real space” is reconstituted from disparate sites to reconfigure and engender new hybrid meanings. This is a hybrid production of “different spaces”, heterogeneous in content and form, appropriated from multiple allegiances and multi-cultural perspectives.

By repurposing or misusing “proper” hierarchies and frameworks to reconstruct a new fictitious space, the work questions the instability of meaning, illusion of hierarchy, and power structures. This new space is created through scanning, deconstruction, hybridization, and bricolage. Using mostly images culled from the internet and re-appropriating works of other artists, originality and authorship is questioned as well as what it means to create a contemporary painting today. A new hybrid space is reconstituted where different locales of time, space, and complexities are made to clash and co-exist in a single space.

The temporal and visual anomalies are made visible in content and in the way the image is made. In “The Infinite Hours of Orlando” a piece of kimono from a Hokusai wood block print becomes a branch over floating white t-shirts appropriated from a Peter Doig painting. The shirts are laid in expressive thick paint compared to flat airbrushed manipulation of a Liz Lerner sculpture, which seats over a mountainous montage landscape appropriated from Daniel Tierney. However, these images are mediated as existing jpeg images on the internet before appropriated.

The work draws from various cultures and multiple sources, this multiplicity is focused and placed on the reader. The audience reads meaning into the work. The reader is born through the death of the author (Roland Barthes). Originality and authorship are questioned through the act of how the work is made through appropriation and in the visual metaphor. In “Eventual Deliquesce”, the image is almost mirrored, but slightly different. There is a skewed reflection in the water from a window where the original source of reflection is absent. The reflection is a “tissue of quotations”. Roland Barthes’ challenged the idea of originality and authorship. He stated that meaning exists in a “multi-dimensional space” where nothing is original, but rather meanings, “blend and clash”.