OCMGS
Ostensibly Colored Monochromatic Glass Screens
When I start on a new concept, I anticipate failure because this failure leads me. Bad things don’t happen to us, they happen for us. Is that why the cowboys won? Or did they win? As Samuel Beckett stated, “All of old, nothing else ever, ever tried, ever failed, no matter, try again, fail again.” My research and planning phase on the ostensibly colored monochromatic screens, started with a failure to communicate, effecting my direction with weird breakthroughs and self discoveries.
During a three month job in Mumbai, India, I was able to explore my experience by writing daily, an exercise in experience, in and of its self, which proved to be a catalyst for my new screen series. Inspired by conflict and metamorphosis between culture and nature, encapsulating the corruption of American ideals and historical myths, creating an ethos of impermanence and transformations, (perhaps the example of the Cowboy vs. the Indian where one is hell bent on manifestation and the other for living in harmony with nature may best illustrate this struggle). The second, what better to convey this composition than to recreate the Big Screen.
In exploring these socio-critical splinters, I began isolating movements of the world’s youth using incisive and abrasive techniques, the current images are pulled from different sources. Using highly reflective, vibrant, ostensibly colored screens, I then mounted these images to project their shadows, as well as stenciling their shadows onto the screen. My goal was to incorporate subjects that were isolated in their action and frozen in movement, whether involved in a movement of freedom, under force, or during play. The location of the image and reason for the action is not relevant since the message is in the momentary, regardless the action. The spirit is alive, whether for ‘cultural’ or ‘natural’ reasons, this action of an “ostensible now” is what I wanted to contrast with the ostensibly colored monochromatic screens. These screens are coated in a glass dust, ‘doost,’ that is highly reflective and extremely soft to the touch. I created ‘doost’ because I needed a street sign quality reflection, but could not find glass fine enough to adhere to paint. After a few years of research and failure, I finally had a breakthrough with finding a high heat emersion process and the team needed to pull something like this off. This work and research finally provided the product I was envisioning, ‘Doost’ was born and my screens vibrated light.
In recreating my own version of the big screen, the movie screen, the cinematic portal, from iPhones to flat screens, I wanted my screen to project a system where we are unconsciously fed branded information, a constant flow of masterminded branding, marketing ostensibly colored as entertainment. I wanted to create a screen-like atmosphere that would explain not only the world’s place and time, but mine as well. However, I want my work to translate into a wider narrative than my own, an age defining narrative with respect to a past perspective. Before this body of work, all materials I worked with were rough. I was using concrete and steel because my concentration was based more on installation and creating simple gestures with words that translated into sheer confusion of space filled inquiries. These inquiries led to a larger socio-critical experiment and that is how I came to dissect the modern condition of youth. This curiosity led me to graduate school where I researched conditions of the youth, I sat in public school classrooms, all this in order to get closer to the source. The state of education is always a great baseline for any society, and to simply gaze into the pubic educational system is to peer into the abyss of society, usually catching a glimpse of happenings to society as a whole. Even easier, just get an instagram account. Having travelled for work to many third world countries, I developed a sense of responsibility, an incurable itch for what is happening outside my world, and started investigating the situations that arise around the world whether good or bad. I wanted to bring a mindfulness to happenings and a starting point for reflection.
My work is not meant to be political, yet it challenges to open dialogue. My hope is to create symbolic value in a humanistic approach through these expressions of freedom, movement, change, reflection and progress. One of my goals is to have the images screen printed on laser cut acrylic, going forward, I plan to make larger pieces with varying colored backgrounds, and large scale simple glass screens with no subjects; just color, glass, a point of reflection and light. Through my work I am compelled to present the sublime, the colorful and the beauty of the beast, even if the viewer is to simply wonder, “What is this?”