• You Can Lose Your Balance consists of two projects related through an engagement with chance, perceptual reorientation and material transformation. The show’s title directly addresses the audience, referring to the woozy first person point-of-view consistent in all of the work. In the context of transfiguration, the paintings function as evidence or aftermath, while the video is a vehicle. They both involve direct, low-tech material interventions to reveal process within form and push the limits of structural stability.

  • The paintings aim to expand on the idea of what constitutes a gesture, conveying a ham-fisted, spasmatic relationship to conventional practices. Loss of control is contrived, simulating an absurd degree of technical misadventure: a parody that none-the-less results in a genuine sense of gestalt. In these works, I avoid intentional composition or direct image making, enabling chance to determine form to a large extent. The ground is established, the stage is set, then dumb acts of wrestling and sabotage occur in lieu of anything remotely resembling technique. As the material warps and collapses, optical, even pictorial effects appear in the surfaces and contours of the objects. The tension between pictorial allusion and obtuse material is of interest to me. Gestures grow out of comedic notions about art-making, studio process and skill, but they also refer to broader ideas about civic dilapidation and frustration in everyday life.

  • The digital video projection, Flash Art (Circles and Rectangles), utilizes strategies of structuralist filmmaking and low-tech studio experimentation to produce a dizzying formal phase-progression. Close-up flickering of a common studio clip light (the circle) loops and layers within the space of the video frame (the rectangle), providing a trance-inducing temporal and optical voyage. Modifications of scale and opacity activate rhythmic expansion and contraction of the video space. Staggering of layered tracks produces chance alignments between light, space and sound. Ambient audio, including a fragment of music, the clicking of the light switch, the oscillation of a studio fan and the groan of the camera’s own lens adjustments, contributes to a composite mise-en-scene. Structural limits are tested through the mechanism of the camera itself. Set to auto-exposure, the lens struggles to acclimate to the bright blasts of light. With each click on or off of the bulb, the image shifts from overexposed white to pitch darkness. A fading monofilament at the center of the light bulb creates a hallucinatory afterimage, momentarily anchoring the eye before being lost in the next blast.

  • SCOTT WOLNIAK