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Hovering Above The Waters
a series designed for
the 2001 Switchyard exhibition at
Zeigeist Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee
2001
click on images for details
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A Cautionary Tale or
The Artist's Statement
Like Nick Cave in Wim Wender's Wings of Desire in which
he mutters to himself "I'm not going to sing about a girl...
I'm not going to sing about a girl" before announcing that
"This one's about a girl, she lived in room 29...,"
I cautiously offer a pre-amble about a definition, when every
critical bone in my body groans. Hovering Above The Waters
is an condensed installation that assigns its meaning less by
metaphor and more by metonymy. Within the semiotic model of
metonymy, meaning is prescribed by the substitution of one object
for another that is closely associated with it. Whereas, the
metaphor describes a signifier which points towards a signified
meaning. While such basic metonyms are Washington standing in
for the US government at large or the phrase "to give her
a diamond ring" which connotes marriage, a more complex
form is found within James Burke's wildly convoluted treks through
history, or better yet the associative power with the children's
game "telephone." While Freudian and Jungian psychologists
love this game for the emergence of an individual's subconscious
to speak through slippages or the revelation of archetypes,
the game also allows for a collective meaning to be constructed
with the absence of a dominant semiotic authority.
Thus, I presented Hovering Above The Waters as a piece
of metonymy. Each of my three pieces shown in Zeitgeist's Switchyard
exhibition holds diffused visual clues which refer back towards
a simple metonymic leap. The title itself is drawn from Genesis
1:2, in which the Spirit of God floats over the primordial waters
which he just created as a robin flutters overs her children.
That is the image that the text is supposed to offer, yet my
personal reading is of aeroplanes falling from the sky, not
simply the visual representation, but also the aural manifestation
of that image. I make no claims of grand spiritual enlightenment
or utterance of the name of God within this piece, yet it holds
a circuitous intelligence to it.
My previous hesitance in offering a clarification of terms comes
from a well grounded critical perspective that art should not
be explained to an audience before they've had a chance to experience
it. Intention is of great importance through the history of
art, but intentions are meaningless if they are not well executed.
I can make all the verbal arguments in the world about the greatness
of this or that, but there is little point if I don't communicate
them through the medium that I have chosen. And that medium
is rust.
Jim Haynes - Summer 2001 |
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