2005 Artist Statement
"Memories may escape the action of the will, may sleep a long time, but when stirred by the right influence, though that influence be light as a shadow, they flash into full stature and life with everything in place" (J. Muir) We live now in a digital age. Digital technology has changed and made more accessible information and communication of all kinds. It has also changed our approaches and perspectives towards our lives. It has changed photography just as photography changed painting. It has changed not only the way we use our equipment and the ways we view and treat photography as a medium, but also the way we as human beings remember and capture our memories. If you change the way you approach memory – if you change your relationship to memories themselves – consider the effect that has on your sense of self, and self-perception. In a similar fashion, memory is central to art viewing. Art cannot affect a viewer without memory. Art itself cannot evolve without its own memory. The 'era' in art --if it can be called that-- in which we currently create is characterized by its frenetic referencing and sampling from art history. In painting, and in art in general, there is always a thing that is there, a solid material object which cannot be changed. Through it we measure ourselves against something else that is not physically present, something that belongs to the immaterial world, to memory, and can only be thought, imagined, experienced. I am gripped by that experience and the invisible movement that art offers us: the flow of the gaze and breath, the journey of images filtering through memories and experiences—Maler’s “creative power of contemplation”. Memory is operating in us at all times, and as a 'creator' painting is central to the way I interact with the objects and images I create. There are paintings everywhere I look in the world, and through a camera I feel that I am able to unlock pieces of that great expression. To me, the moments around us are like paint from a tube, they can be mixed, applied, molded to create a composition that reads as a painting—and affects its viewers in the same ways. I would challenge you to ask yourself: how do the abstractions we read from in our everyday lives differ from those we view in the gallery? I think perhaps only in the context itself, and the individual will to find communication in the languages of abstraction. What is it in the first place that ‘evokes’ through the abstraction of art? We scavenge, deconstruct, play with, meditate on, and laugh at the unceasing collection of images we produce. There is no way to dispose of them; we seem only able to bring them in and out of the dialogue. Yet the one constant through the flow of images that represents our experience together is the very abstraction of experience, of memory; and thus, I’d suggest, we might as well appreciate its mysteries. -Tripp Baird 12/2005 “Hope is nurtured every time something appears, a scattered, partial, initial hint of something which reminds me of what I long for, or which conveys a hint of it… Letting a thing come… no assertions, constructions, formulations, inventions, ideologies—in order to gain access to all that is genuine, richer, more alive: to what is beyond my understanding.” (G. Richter) |
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