Type of Submission

Podium Presentation

Keywords

Art, Typography, Art Theory, Philosophy, Linguistics, Communication Theory

Proposal

Capturing scenes with fences and propeller-seeds, six drawings construct a tense, silent atmosphere. Secondary subjects include mollusk-like creatures and mysterious typography. I hope for this body of work to withstand our attempts to assert it into theme, for it to testify the indifferent, concrete form of experience.

Implied light and value render varying textures: the splintery surface of the fence, the ripples in the skin of the creatures, the smooth petals of the propeller-seeds. Space appears in the rhythmic positioning of foreground, midground, and background: the creatures in the foreground, the fence in the midground, and an expanse of misty atmosphere in the background. The drawings present both an unsettling tension and a calm quietness. Tension appears in the compositions packed with elements closely relating to one another. Yet, these compositions build on foundational elements of calmness: horizontal line and negative space. Horizontal line, implied by the fence and repeated in the typography, serves as a stable backbone for the compositions; negative space, the airy background, expands beyond the borders of the work, conveying a feeling of openness that absorbs sound.

Through my time working with Fence & Seed, I was able to rethink how our language relates to experience. While language is concept which exists only within our range of consciousness, experience always exceeds our consciousness; for example, when we observe an apple, we can accurately perceive and express its color through language, yet we remain unconscious of the innumerable sum of events, that is the physical, anatomical, or psychological mechanics, the experience, that culminates in the apple’s color. This distance between language and experience may be the distance between human language and divine language; human language operates within the reality defined by divine language, unable to exhaust or exceed reality.

I conclude that the function of our language is not to replicate experience, but rather, to associate multiple experiences with one another. This conclusion pressures me to clarify our usage of language, namely, to suggest our words should not attempt to describe experience, but rather, should construct a cognitive bridge between experiences — even when this may seem impossible.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Publication Date

2023

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Fence and Seed

Capturing scenes with fences and propeller-seeds, six drawings construct a tense, silent atmosphere. Secondary subjects include mollusk-like creatures and mysterious typography. I hope for this body of work to withstand our attempts to assert it into theme, for it to testify the indifferent, concrete form of experience.

Implied light and value render varying textures: the splintery surface of the fence, the ripples in the skin of the creatures, the smooth petals of the propeller-seeds. Space appears in the rhythmic positioning of foreground, midground, and background: the creatures in the foreground, the fence in the midground, and an expanse of misty atmosphere in the background. The drawings present both an unsettling tension and a calm quietness. Tension appears in the compositions packed with elements closely relating to one another. Yet, these compositions build on foundational elements of calmness: horizontal line and negative space. Horizontal line, implied by the fence and repeated in the typography, serves as a stable backbone for the compositions; negative space, the airy background, expands beyond the borders of the work, conveying a feeling of openness that absorbs sound.

Through my time working with Fence & Seed, I was able to rethink how our language relates to experience. While language is concept which exists only within our range of consciousness, experience always exceeds our consciousness; for example, when we observe an apple, we can accurately perceive and express its color through language, yet we remain unconscious of the innumerable sum of events, that is the physical, anatomical, or psychological mechanics, the experience, that culminates in the apple’s color. This distance between language and experience may be the distance between human language and divine language; human language operates within the reality defined by divine language, unable to exhaust or exceed reality.

I conclude that the function of our language is not to replicate experience, but rather, to associate multiple experiences with one another. This conclusion pressures me to clarify our usage of language, namely, to suggest our words should not attempt to describe experience, but rather, should construct a cognitive bridge between experiences — even when this may seem impossible.

 

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