Synchronic Vocabulary(Continued)
Synchronic Dragons:
Paintings From My Teapot Series maybe will be exhibiting First Friday November 5th at Rendezvous, Flagstaff, Arizona – FOR THAT ENTIRE MONTH (I will be there for the opening reception!)
:
”...Illustrating whirlygig effigies…”
If you can, hold a “creative meeting” in an art straddled environment such as a coffee house, introducing open minds to the work, and for the sake of talking ideas in the presence of original and experimental art. I think you will find along with others that you are more creative in the presence of art than in some more sterile setting.
For this reason its interesting for me to exhibit my work in Coffee Houses where people actually sit down and talk ideas in the presence of the art. My motivation to create art is perhaps as research into helping people to be more creative who are around it.
I’ve decided to call this round “Synchronic Dragons”. The Tea Pots are begun with a scribble which may become anything. As a mark, it is a changeling, or like “the Chinese dragon… able to shrink to the size of a silk worm; and then swell up to fill the entire space between heaven and earth. It can make itself visible or invisible, as it so chooses. It can take on human form or that of another animal to carry out some secret mission.” As an art experience, I feel that the potential meanings may occur synchronically in the minds of those in the presence of the artwork, as a kind of pre-linguistic synchronization.(Source: S. Wells Williams: http://www.ninedragonbaguazhang.com/dragons.htm )
To speak with me, the artist, call 928-273-7679
To speak with Hotel Management about purchasing work or if the show is up, call Sean McMahan at 928-699-9853 or Jimmy Craven at 928-799-6971
THERE WILL HOPEFULLY BE A SHOW FOR THE NOVEMBER FIRST FRIDAY ART WALK. And remember: There’s no better place for enlightened discussion than in the presence of art.
More Ken Boe @ www.kenboe.com
..Some of my best Teapot paintings will be showing in an on-going arrangement and some work may hang in the adjacent Hotel Monte Vista.
The Rendezvous is being renovated and expanded along with other improvments to the hotel:
100 N. San Francisco St., Flagstaff, Arizona, 86001
phone: 928-779-6971 toll free: 800-545-3068 fax: 928-779-2904
The synchronic vibration between object and metaphor is the central magic or beauty that my artwork is concerned with. It is a thesis behind my art that all objects, be they containers such as teapots, old rusty cans, sculptures, tree roots, or concepts themselves, continually vibrate frequencies of inchoate meaning which register in our minds as a continuum of metaphorical variability. This is as simple as a child imagining a tin can to be a space ship, or as complex as Game Theory . I am interested in how the embodied mind gives meaning to things, but also, that our minds are but another coincidence on the shores of Universe where waves of energy flow in and out dynamically in collaboration with creation. Original artwork is by this means a powerful player in the rhythmic conundrums of conscious and unconscious, and the way we experience a synchronic vocabulary of our immediate peripheral environment, which is the language we share with those whom we are conversing with, where we are conversing, such as at one of my art receptions.
Just as one concept becomes an analogy for another, one image or physical object metaphorically becomes conceptual, and the cycle continues indefinitely. Within the random details of its liberating ambiguity, original artwork is one of the most powerful tools we have for generating not just new meanings, but new coincidental meanings that tie our creativity into the breathing universe. By artwork I mean painting, all the traditional arts and crafts, also including their collaboration and synthesis with other mediums such as philosophy and mathematics. This manifesto is itself an artwork. And historically, one could say that both science and possibly religion are sub-genres of art.
Both the reception and invention of meaning appears to take place in our minds, such as in private thoughts. But even those do not occur in a vacuum for us interstellar-dreaming social animals engaged in so much conversation and collaboration, where meaning takes place in much more intense oscillations of simultaneous understanding, or synchronic vibration. Though the dictionary of idiom and simile, and the thesaurus of synonym may capture in recorded word formations many of these intersections of object and metaphor, actual meanings only occur like puffs of smoke, or flashes of light. The meanings stay warm no more than a pot of tea shared by two people discussing them (creatively finding meaning and re-finding meaning as their minds roam the languages they find themselves in, which are as much the objects in the room they inhabit as it is their other available lexicons.)
Meaning is contextual, but the ambiguity of art allows infinite signifiers of potential meaning/metaphor to be juxtaposed in experimental compositions which are open ended for viewers to harvest in whatever moment prevails. The “textus” of context is a kaleidoscope of variability where meaning is weaved from context, but always changing because the infinite variables of context are always changing. If “so and so” says something while drinking tea that is a different context, and therefore meaning, than if he was drinking beer when he said it. If an artwork is painted on canvas that is a different context than if it is painted on plywood. The spin of meaning continues if its tar, dirt, and blood painted on the canvas, but expensive oil paints and gold leaf on the plywood. All this before we even get to the antique pornography or the images stolen off of a secret government database.
Synchronic vibrations become meaning like puffs of light in the moment of a brainstorm, and then they are gone (though the artist may put them into fac-simile – pun intended.) At best, facsimiles are all that we are ever left with. But it works because then the facsimile (artwork, neologism, consumer product, etc.), and the details of its ambiguity, become objects through which the synchronic vibrations may continue at other new levels, history be damned (or undammed.) Thus the word facsimile itself is etymologically rooted in likenesses, not literalness, prior to the technology metaphors it generated from early copy machines to fax machines, meaning exact copy, and now back again to my usage. And the poetry to this is that “exact copies”, things “literal”, “realist”, etc. are no less likenesses than the most ambiguous metaphor. Only context can shift it around rhetorically to where you want it, and then its gone again, copies to the wind.
The kinds of objects that I am most concerned with at the moment are containers. The container “schema” is, according to my old teacher, the philosopher Mark Johnson, and his collaborators, metaphorically/conceptually rooted in our bodily experience in this gravity-based world. Our bodies are containers, ideas or sets are containers, art shows are containers; anything with an “in” or an “out” is metaphorically connected to our bodily experience with/in container schemas. So there is a lot of room for artists to mess around in there, with these ideas, or just ones intuition, collaborations, and research of container phenomenon. My theory is not necessary, it is just another artwork to bounce ideas off of.
For Synchronic Vessels, my January 2010 exhibition in Downtown Las Vegas, Nevada, I have focused on the teapot as a central theme. The images themselves are secondary to the techniques used to paint them. Shadows are casted from old used containers dumped into the desert, and deteriorated. Scribbles are registered from my unconscious mind and then randomly drawn into teapot persona. Colors, textures, paint application methods, and compositional modalities are juxtaposed off of one another. Philosophy aside, my intent is to create images which 1.) Haven’t existed before but are on some level attached to our worldly experience. 2.) Art which directly represents the creative process itself by being experimental. 3.) Art which is available to the viewers unconscious as a source of creative inspiration and visual vocabulary. 4.) Art which has the possibility of emotional narrative, for easier digestion. Well maybe not.
For Synchronic Chaos, my January 2010 exhibition in Downtown Phoenix, Arizona, I have hazarded more experimental work using encaustic painting techniques where pigments, resins, and bee’s wax are burned into the artwork, along with other assembled materials. In these works I further all the techniques used in the teapot paintings, as well as invent new ones, which is partly the point. Synchronic chaos is that moment when what appears chaotic aligns within us either as déjà vu, coincidence, or as an insight, revelation, miracle, or art form. Like a flash of smoke, doing highly experimental artwork assures producing articles of synchronic chaos. The artwork itself is the facsimile of ones chaotic determinations with the unrehearsed; the mixed-metaphors sodden with mixed-media; the emotionally and intellectually improvised problem solving of purged imagination and physical world. The artwork, in turn, is a prime conductor for transmitting its own synchronic vibrations in the mental hands of audience. The difference between my two exhibitions, their duality, is that the vessel work has a more refined, or focused ontology, whereas the chaos show, like the space itself, is more open-ended. Both shows are full of the details of ambiguity from which you may invent your own salvation, if so inclined.
For more on Ken Boe, click here.
Click here for the news article about the arts in Miami Arizona
Join the Miami Arts Commision – WWW.MIAMIARTSCOMMISSION.ORG Only 10 bucks!
Link here to images of the encaustic and mixed-media works in Miami Arizona show
Link here to see previous exhibition at Coppermine, from my Teapot Series