impulse

Last time you saw a blog from me that wasn’t about an abstractionist, was when I wrote about my current project, village impulse. Please come see the show btw, it’s up at Birdland in Raleigh through the end of July, and will transform over the course of its run. The impulse for writing I had this week was, well…

As I often do, I try to reflect on things I’ve written previously as I begin a new blog/essay. Partly to track how my thoughts evolve, and, also to see what threads pull through. One that came to mind was about immediacy which had as its thesis “I’m convinced that there is an experience to be had through Art that is unique to the same and exists- with immediacy- prior to our ability to describe it using language.”

I think of the two as tied together- “immediacy”, as described above, and “impulse” as I’ll describe it in the context of an exhibit about disruption and automatic drawing. The impulse that I’ve been nurturing through this show, which has led to some mark-making I have not been employing in my practice in the last couple of years, is about acting outside of thinking, trusting intuition. Make a mark, react, react to that. The disruption piece comes in as a means to dislodge conscious thought and concern about starting or finishing, and also involved strategies to randomly generate starting points that make this easier. Below is an example of something I made for this show.

Said differently, that impulse that drives me into the unknown is the same one that drives me towards Art that doesn’t ask that I treat it like a codex. I make the type of work I do because I want viewers to experience something that is not yet known to them. I covered this in an essay from May of ’23 called The Matrix. It isn’t about simulacra- it’s about a specific matrix I created (hey, just trying to grab your attention, glad to see all it takes is capitalizing one letter…).

Sure this isn’t everyone’s bag. I hope that will continue to be one of the wonderful things about the Art world that we all create together in our weird village. To call out what I’m pointing at, it’s the umbrella thing- lots of types of activities can fit under here. Including ideas that other, specific ideas aren’t good or correct ideas, because that’s an idea, too.

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Also and… Impulse, more specifically the freedom to act on it, feels so incredibly precious in this moment. I’m referring here to our point in human history, which Jason and the other artists involved in village impulse and myself wanted visitors to be aware of. I say precious because we live in a time when it feels like every. Thing. We. Do. Or. Say. Has. Consequences. What a tragic situation and how beautiful to move outside of that and just… make. We think, at least.