The series of sculptures
designated for wall space, titled, “BLIND SPOT”, came from my visual
interpretation of the term and title, the FOLD
(from Deleuze’s essay on Foucault and Liebniz) in my desire to examine
possibilities within the materiality of a thin sheet of metal and paper; the
two flat malleable materials that are three dimensional objects, but commonly
referred to as two dimensional only for these objects’ sides being negligibly
thin.
This new body of work is informed
by my earlier work, the paper bag sculptures of 2015, where I deconstructed
shopping bags/containers to address the ambiguity of the interchangeable
subjectivity from inside to outside, with shapes cut and folded (not
extracted), twisted inside out, and inversely, blurring the notions of
separations we continuously make, although subconsciously, of these opposites,
front and back, inside out, right and wrong sides, etc.
Although Deleuze's definition of the Fold had very little to do with
physical forms we perceive; (The Fold as man in relation to himself, the Fold
of time, The Fold as in self mastery, etc.), taking his phrase out of context,
“Inside is nothing more than the fold of the outside” gave me a new perspective
from which to talk about the sculpture as a painting; utilizing all three sides
(including the thin space in between front and back) that we habitually reduce
as a two dimensional object; this
inclusion/ inverting the order of front and back also lead me to realize that
back is just the back of the front, as is the front also the back of the back,
depending on where you are standing.
The raw materials (in its “2D”
forms) are painted first, front and back. Then the random marks are made to
either guide shapes to be cut, or to be reconfigured once cut into shapes,
folded, and inverted; The possibilities explored are guided by a set of simple
rules, a) not eliminating a section while the cuts are made to rearrange
itself, and b)not adding another material to the process, therefore using its
own body to sculpt itself. This in a sense responds to Deleuze’s fold as “the
name for one’s relation to oneself”.
The part 2 of the installation,
the paintings are still life images of the sculptures (not necessarily in the
show- but from the same body of work) to extend the discussion further with the
notion of what is seen and what is hidden often in a still life. The painted
images of the sculptures are taken from more than one view so to included sides
or the insides that aren’t shown from one view unless pivoted or turned around
or turned upside down. It provided me the multiple interpretations of a single
object that I was looking for, specially for the objects themselves having
sides that were exposing the interiors of the objects.
The object was to include the
blind spots in what we normally observe or perceive which sometimes are the
sides of the objects, and the backs and most often the inside of the objects.
