Today I re-read Joan Kee’s book on Korean contemporary abstract art in the light of seeing Jonathon Kim’s work at the West Thebarton gallery and on the back page of the recent edition of Artist Profile. What struck me was the phrase ‘activating the space between materials and perception’ and the idea of encounter. While I am not repurposing found materials it is the nature of Kim’s large sculptural work ‘Density’ that interests me in particular. The boxed frames stretch around the room and proceed in monochrome. The audience assumes the position of the artist as it approaches each piece in the sequence and occupies the vacant space left by the artist. This becomes a journey which completes the work.
Having a box around the hanging forms is a very western art idea and something I have always taken for granted. I have essentially been drawing boxes or frames around aspects of the world all of my life and my long connection with film as a medium and the physicality of film stock has reinforced this idea as has drawing endless frames in storyboards. Without a storyboard, a film is shapeless. With a storyboard, the linearity provides a narrative and the verticality, the metaphor. Even if a storyboard is a sequence of numbered blanks [as may happen if the action requires it], we still read it as a narrative and interpret the emptiness accordingly as waiting time presaging action to come.
While my pieces are paintings and not sculptures, they have size, weight and dimensionality, and the audience is asked to move along the considerable length connecting with image and text. However, my beginning point was film and the idea of repeated frames that advance the narrative in increments. For me time is the important factor. I am defining time, or at least the passing of time, as the interstice between events or phenomena. At 24 frames per second the distance between events is often enormous. The density of image and associated elements of text, spoken dialogue and sound, provide so much information that to view a second of film in this way is overwhelming but ultimately provides little in the way of understanding the overall narrative or metaphor.
The illusion is that either standing and contemplating each frame or attempting to understand the sequence by walking the length of the painting will provide ultimate understanding. This dichotomy faces us every day. The plethora of detail in our daily lives obscures the bigger picture.
