SNAP invites you to attend

Mark Bovey

The Ledge_ Suite



Artist's Talk:
Friday, June 4th 8-10pm, 2009

Opening Reception:
Friday, June 4th 8-10pm, 2009

Exhibition Duration:
June 4th – July 18th, 2009

Venue: SNAP’s Main Gallery

Statement:

Over the past year I have been making work that questions our relationship with the consumer culture we are embedded in. From a Canadian context it seems that since 9-11, our perception of the world has been confirmed as shifted from one of some trust and security in the free capitalist democratic system to one of philosophical unrest and confusion; that we have been jarred into the reality of our unstable world, whether political, environmental, or ideological realms which are undoubtedly linked. What or who should we trust or even listen to? This is the result of our inability to fathom, but reliance on, the abstract complexity of the ocean of information, both factual and rhetorical, that we try to process. As it piles up, the effect is numbing and creates individual and collective amnesia, attention deficit, procrastination, and insecurity. French philosopher Jean Baudrillard suggested in his 2003 work “Passwords” that this confused state
of disconnection forces a society to probe history to ground us and locate meaning. Probing history, both past and recent through printed images forms the basis of the ideas I explore through printmaking.

In my work I try to present this complexity by merging an array of image sources from antique illustrated science and humanity texts to virtual images from the Internet and between. The symbolic exchange via digital and analog technologies, are compressed in the printmaking matrix whether digital or physical. I hope that the work is both a residue of my collective experience while also being an image landscape open to a multitude of operative readings, or an open or rhizome- structured experience. It seems more now than ever that the modes of experience and belief systems are intertwined, that all fields of inquiry are in question, that the virtual is a new reality, perhaps the only place to locate a new utopia outside of the imagination while also taking control over the way we
experience the world as mediated.

What of printed “Images”, symbols of the transcribed physical world, constructions, technologies? A printed image is the record of thought(s) or idea(s) as Joseph Beuys terms it “thinking as form”- experience that is
connected to its context by its form, “an experience” but not necessarily a fact or truth except in its existence. At their best, printed words or images are records of human inquiry, technologies revealed, attempts to find meaning, to connect with others, of having been here: a shared stick in the sand hoping to link us with others of like and other experience. In the virtual sphere, the image on the screen is only an image, and not an image-record because of its fragile nature lacking concrete form: purely technological. The only thing more illusive is the image in our imagination. Because of the reliance on energy to reveal this image we cannot fully trust
its authority because of its ability to be altered, enhanced or abstracted. It seems that today we live in a complex image culture that is driven by these technologies, that the image field has expanded and we are not sure that we trust where we are being led. What of the effect of layered images on our ways of understanding the world? These are the questions that I am interested in and that I try to make works that integrate the complex field of images that we experience today. The questions seem to be, what are we seeing, and how does what we see inform or confuse us? At the root we
seem to be wondering where to look.

Mark Bovey 2009

Site last updated June 7th 2009, updated by Shiftinggrounddesign.com