End of term reflections

We are coming to the end of our summer studio term which signals the halfway mark of my MFA degree. It's been a strange couple of months for obvious reasons, but it has been remarkably productive for me in terms of thinking about and repositioning my practice. Here's a statement I made in October of 2019 and I'm fascinated by some of the fundamental shifts of interest.

"My Project:

Abstraction is a way for me to talk about things/being in the world without relying on making things that look like things.

I'm not interested in purity or the essential or the universal but I am interested in compressing forms so that they bounce back at you.

I'm interested in reducing things so that they seem simple, uncomplicated but certainly are not certain. They do not have clear meaning. They don't mean one thing but can take you elsewhere to other things. This strategy allows room for interpretation, for contemplation.

I make this work because in my experience of being in the world, it needs more space for unrestricted thought, imagining, free-association, reverie.

This is my project."

What strikes me most significantly are three things:

1. I have shifted into a more factual/actual recording of things in the world (ie. rubbing of vents, colour from direct observation).

2. I'm still interested in reduction, but with the aims of making things more specific, to create a space for a focused presentation of ideas.

3. I'm still working on doing better at this, but I'm aware of the need to decenter my experience of the world (as a straight, white, Anglophone, upper-middle-class, middle-aged man).