AXIOMS
My inspiration has always been the push and pull of things; negotiating states of momentary equilibrium between reason and “non-reason,” an embodied experience of being. It is also a reaction to changes pervading every aspect of our contemporary world: issues of digital technology, Ai, machine learning, the loss of tactility and the over-emphasis of (visual) representation, which create suspended states between pragmatism and ideology, and a futile yet relentless aspiration for perfection.
The contemporary paradigm is one of multitudes, contextual relativism, and flux. This is very much in contrast to European, especially to Eastern-European, intellectual traditions, which assert Ideals and hold individuals to the impossible test of living up to them. In the challenging landscape of personal, political, and cultural values, I cannot help but to wonder if there are any fundamentals left (including Plato’s favorite virtues: truth and knowledge) or if they have ever been... My work reflects on the fluidity of these virtues as they are perceived, presented, and utilized by experience. My materials and methods are dialectic, presenting a state of inner dialogue, precariousness and tension. Everything, including the audience, is implicated. Each of my installations is a stage, a theater set of what-ifs, in which the various parts come together to assume but never specify a narrative.
Parlor Games is a series of installations where this is the most evident. The series explores epistemology, objectivity, and language by tactile, subjective and autobiographical means.
Axiomatic is a collaboration with mathematicians that directly addresses this question of knowable, self-evident fundamentals. While each scientist contextualizes axioms differently in her respective reach area, during our conversations I search to find and understand the universally shared ones to see how they set the foundation of subsequent systems. While we tend to think of things (nouns) as axioms, I find that behaviors, actions and processes (verbs) are even more-widely shared and understood. Thus, my process itself becomes part discovery, part production, allowing me to shuttle between ideas and actualization, research, form, and documentation. In this circuit of thinking by making and making by instigating, I also have discovered a valuable currency for a discourse about methodology and pedagogy.
