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ARTIST STATEMENT
About MANUFACTURED SIGNIFICANCE
What does it mean to be a maker of objects in a society of excess? Joseph Kosuth said that “art is making meaning.” In the series “Art As Idea As Idea”, he investigates language and art making, a conceptual model versus its physical manifestation.
Inspired by this line of thinking, I’m investigating the inherent cultural discussion that our language and our technologies pose. Framing this within the language of art allows distillation and experimentation.
MANUFACTURED SIGNIFICANCE is one in a series of pieces mimicking functionality; proprietary tooling to engage one’s imagination. Our post-post modern environment can be confounding; systems built upon systems with rules to their functions, often at odds with each other, and all weighted with the inherent values and cultural implications of their respective points of inception. This piece’s visual language is borrowed from mark making, tooling, woodworking, masonry and sculpture combined in such a way as to conjure a playful ambiguity. It attempts to re-contextualize these familiar elements in novel and perhaps absurd ways to allow for new avenues of inquiry.
The work invites viewers to deconstruct and reimagine the boundaries between function and form, between the practical and the speculative. Technology, defined as "the practical application of knowledge", becomes a malleable concept, with "practical" itself becoming a site of creative interrogation.
-- Schuyler Blanchard
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