Paula Rego

R&D II 2015 spring first submission

     During last semester’s investigations I started to explore traditional linear narrative devices and a spectrum between hyper linear structures and trans linear narrative representations. My original narrative construction was based on speculative literature involving the basic tropes of classic science fiction and psychological horror of midcentury America, specifically Phillip K Dick, Frank Herbert, Rod Sterling and Gene Roddenberry. The story was titled Uncanny Valley after the psychological phenomenon of the same name. The uncanny valley, according to Oxford dictionary, originated in the   1970s from a translation of Japanese bukimi no tani, coined by the roboticist Masahiro Moti, who created a graph that plotted the emotional response of a human being to a robot against the increase in the perceived realism of a robot. Oxford states that the graph showed a significant dip at the point where the robot's resemblance to a human is perceived to be almost exact.  I chose this line of development mainly because of the work I was already producing. After categorizing the specific elements that I repeatedly drew I came to recognize two major themes in my work: 1. The Other (including masks, costuming, as well as anamorphic shapes and distortions) 2. Time and space as an attempt at organizing reality in a durational capacity.  The second subject matter involving time and space manifested in the form of journaling, juxtaposed with visual renderings often tangentially related. In approaching the concept of narrative directly, I realized that narrative could have dimensions I had been aware of but had not actually put into practice. Parsing narrative in terms of rational progression and mathematical models led me to visualize two working structures as a starting point for this semester’s investigations.  Specifically, the geometric language of points, lines, and rays has given me valuable tools for organizing my thoughts regarding narrative.  I realized traditional notions of narrative may be represented by two points and a line, one point representing a beginning and one point representing an end and a line between them representing the temporal progression of narrative. The model of narrative I found most useful closely resembled the ontological theories of Bergson’s Duration and Deleuze’s ideas of the moment of apprehension.  A mathematical representation of the hyper linear model would look more like an explosion than a clothesline, where the point origin is replaced by a juncture of overlapping rays with no point of origin or expression of an end. I want to keep working with the idea of narrative in my work but I feel it must evolve indirectly. I found that limiting the imagery of my drawings to a specific story or traditional linear narrative structure had a double-sided effect. The traditional linear structure actually fed the flow of ideas but the execution of those ideas was daunting, partially due to their finite (The End) characteristics. I found that sharing the narrative (ephemeral, non linear, telling never ending, or never even actually beginning) of what I intended to do was more exhilarating than the feedback of the actual work. This performance in sharing of the story felt more “real” than explicitly trying to represent them as objects.  At this point, my conclusions have given way to the new question: has modern/post modern/pseudo modern ontology come down to the compromises of Cartesian vs Quantum Wizards of OZ? Maybe it has something to do with actual objects versus objects as pure thought form ,at which point the thoughts begin to transcend the limits of the person experiencing them. Is the experience greater than the sum of its parts?

Research Avenues

      I will research the cargo cult and carnival tropes as the narrative meta structures to my aesthetic investigations. Utilizing my own resources of a woodshop studio, I will explore elements of a carnival language and theatrical presentation. Specifically the carnival as a cultural form used to represent objectification, reification and address the breakdown of contemporary social and personal stratification.  I will ask the questions of how the notion of the cargo cult has evolved to represent modern parities between global cultures as well as technological hegemony. I will also address how the device of the carnival is expressed in contemporary cultural practices. I hope to create a carnival theatre as an interactive narrative machine of actual experiences.

Goal

     My goal is to build a four foot by eight foot shooting gallery complete with targets and “guns”. I will break it down roughly into 6 parts to correspond with the 6 works requirement. I will use two by fours and plywood, maybe canvas, painted with exterior house paint and water based one shot paint. The targets will represent “The Other” and will be made of insulation board and plywood with motion powered by an electric can opener and bicycle parts.

Further notes-Mark making through arbitrary means-

Surrealist automatismhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealist_automatism

Automatism has taken on many forms: the automatic writing and drawing initially (and still to this day) practiced by surrealists can be compared to similar, or perhaps parallel phenomena, such as the non-idiomatic improvisation.

Spring 2015 proposal

During last semesters investigations I started to explore traditional linear narrative devices and a spectrum between hyper linear structures and trans linear narrative representations. My original narrative construction was based on speculative literature involving the basic tropes of classic science fiction and psychological horror of mid century America, specifically Phillip K Dick, Frank Herbert Rod Sterling and Gene Roddenberry. The story was titled Uncanny Valley after the psychological phenomenon of the same name. The uncanny valley according to Oxford dictionary originated in the   ” 1970s: from a translation of Japanese bukimi no tani, coined by the roboticist Masahiro Moti, who created a graph that plotted the emotional response of a human being to a robot against the increase in the perceived realism of a robot; the graph showed a significant dip at the point where the robot's resemblance to a human is perceived to be almost exact.”  I chose this line of development mainly because of the work I was already producing. After categorizing the specific elements that I repeatedly drew I came to recognize two major themes in my work. 1. The Other ( including masks, costuming, as well as anamorphic shapes and distortions)  2. Time and space as an attempt at organizing reality in a durational capacity.  The second subject matter involving time and space manifested in the form of journaling juxtaposed with visual renderings often tangentially related. In approaching the concept of narrative directly as I did I realized that narrative could have dimensions I had been aware of but had not actually put into practice. Parsing narrative in terms of rational progression and mathematical models lead me to visualize two working structures as a starting point for this semesters investigations.  Specifically the geometric language of points lines and rays has given me valuable tools for organizing my thoughts regarding narrative.  I realized traditional notions of narrative can be represented by two points and a line, one point representing a beginning and one point representing an end and a line between them representing the temporal progression of narrative. The model of narrative I found most useful closely resembled the ontological theories of Bergson’s Duration and Deleuze’s ideas of the moment of apprehension.  A mathematical representation of the hyper linear model would look more like an explosion than a clothes line, where the point origin is replaced by a juncture of overlapping rays with no point of origin or expression of an end. I want to keep working with the idea of narrative in my work but I feel it must evolve indirectly. I found that limiting the imagery of my drawings to a specific story or traditional linear narrative structure had a double sided effect. The traditional linear structure actually fed the flow of ideas but the execution of those ideas was daunting partially due to their finite (The End) characteristics. I found that sharing the narrative (ephemeral non linear telling never ending or never even actually beginning) of what I intended to do was more exhilarating than the feedback of the actual work. This performance in sharing of the story felt more ”real” than explicitly trying to represent them as objects.  At this point my conclusions have given way to the new question: has modern/post modern/pseudo modern ontology come down to the compromises of  Cartesian vs Quantum wizards of OZ. Maybe it has something to do with actual objects versus objects as pure thought form at which point the thoughts begin to transcend the limits of the experiencer. Is the experience greater than the sum of its parts?

Research Avenues

      I will research the cargo cult and carnival tropes as the narrative meta structures to my aesthetic investigations. Utilizing my own resources of a woodshop studio, I will explore elements of a carnival language and theatrical presentation. Specifically the carnival as a cultural form used to represent objectification, reification and address the breakdown of contemporary social and personal stratification.  I will ask the questions of how the notion of the cargo cult has evolved to represent modern parities between global cultures as well as technological hegemony. I will also address how the device of the carnival is expressed in contemporary cultural practices. I hope to create a carnival theatre as an interactive narrative machine of actual experiences.

Goal

     My goal is to build a four foot by eight foot shooting gallery complete with targets and “guns”. I will break it down roughly into 6 parts to correspond with the 6 works requirement. I will use two by fours and plywood, maybe canvas , painted with exterior house paint and water based one shot paint. The targets will represent “The Other” and will be made of insulation board and plywood with motion powered by an electric can opener and bicycle parts.

boobeard

visual symbols

The use of symbols in my work takes on a slightly different form. Rather than presenting a single image to stand for an idea or belief, I am compiling images to represent tropes, as a form of packaged thought. Trope is a Greek word that means turn, direction, or way-it is a literary device that works like a motif or cliché. I trend toward using this device in the Michel Foucault sense of addressing the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are related to forms of personal or social control. I am relying on the relationships of multiple images in proximity to each other to inform the viewer and to assist them in the creation of meaning. The images are graphically direct and mostly representational within a range of personal abstraction to emphasize or de-emphasize relationships between ideas within tropes. I perceive these thought packages as interacting with ideas, and I see the ideas as living in the spaces between people or power and structures of belief. For example, a city skyline would fall under “city trope” and all the activity and the control structures associated with that system would be built into a silhouette or detailed representation of buildings. Here are a few of the active tropes and their representative actions in my current work . Increasingly I am discovering their intrinsic dualistic assertions of the mundane and super mundane : • Hair - human and animal. This representation is meant to convey a sense of bestial or primal nature. I find hair can also represent humanity in a humble light in the sense that hair is uncontrollable to some degree when it grows in places seen as socially unacceptable. Hair can also be used as an invitation to touch or indulge, with either pleasure or repulsion. This also implies voluntary loss of control. Other situations where I represent the use of hair is when I am trying to convey gender, life style or demographics. A more complex use of hair occurs when I am attempting to denote a particular biological process associated with a terrestrial perspective of reality as oppose to a non terrestrial based speculation of reality. Examples of the variety of hair I am using are: chest hair, long hair, short hair, style of hair, pubic hair, dominatrix hair, clown hair or theatrical hair. • Flesh- The functions of representations of flesh is very similar and often employed in conjunction with hair. Examples of the types of flesh I use are: Nude or clothed, bubbly flesh,old flesh, pressed flesh,and gravity filled flesh. • Deconstructed clothing Collar structures, stitching, shoes, soles, saddle stitches, socks, shirt collars, buttons, and belts are used in my work to denote class or social position. I also use detailed taxonomies of clothing as an indication of labor and self reliance. I personally take pride in being able to sew and maintain my own clothes. • Buildings I find buildings can be used as indications of social identity. Building elements can also act as extensions of body and body awareness and our relationship to our own mind or how we perceive and negotiate a sense of reality. These tropes might include ledges as indications of interior and exterior boundaries, windows as planes of transient awareness and experience with “the other” as a semi permeable membrane or boundary, gargoyles as guardians in the traditional sense of spiritual vulnerability, air conditioners (atmospheric control on a mundane level-personal awareness and relinquished control subconsciously), dumpsters as stages in our systems of elimination rejection waste or compromise with inefficient systems of commercial or material based cultural superstructures, skylines, cities, suburbs, rooflines and light industrial architectural language. The use of buildings as a device can also imply social density and myths of cultural awareness associated with varying demographics. • Non terrestrial space- This could also be called the speculative fiction trope as I use these elements to convey a sense of other and to potentially highlight traditional attitudes toward colonization or aggressive exploitation of weakness, aggressive use of victim advocacy or to reassure-assert ones own position of power and powerlessness. This is depicted as life support systems (space suits ^deconstructed clothing ^ ) or hegemonic real-estate of the atomic age, that includes pet dinosaurs and objectified human body parts. Less direct components of this trope may include : vehicles of exploration, Boundary-less forms (nebula), trans-dimensional forms of life yet discovered, much less comprehensible to earthly paradigms of informational manipulation or Victorian era age of reason classification. • Deviant behavior –I depict the cultural practice of deviant or behavioral resistance to social norms as an exploration of how people come to terms with ideas that are seen to be culturally threatening. Aggressive sexual posturing combined with partial or full nudity, latex, costumes or masks are meant to convey autonomy or at least passive aggressive sovereignty. So, these are just some of the devices I am using in an attempt to help the viewer find and create meaning in my works.

artist statement

Democracy of Chance -half Japanese -Daniel Johnson-Ray Jhonson Chance cage

Conspiracy of Zeniths

Ephemera of memory. The Ephemera of non renewable resources-peak oil-peak=zenith. Circles. Climbing a hill and the myth of Sisyphus. ephemera of meaning i.e. absurd Pushing a boulder and the certainty that boulders turn to gravel turn to dust. Plasticity of the theatre of life.