| Project Descriptions | |
The polar relationship of order and chaos is understood though our experiences, histories, and choices. To make a decision we look for difference in what otherwise is homogeneous. Our lives are created though these choices, yet as living creatures we also create our choices.
"What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space."
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Disciplines of Geography ________________________________________________
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Disciplines of Geography [mental mapping] A map created by the accumulation of different marks, intentional and otherwise, which define a space.
". . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography." Jorge Luis Borges
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Dividuals [modular multi-panel compostions] The whole is greater than the sum of the parts and wholes.
"To see a world in a grain of sand, William Blake
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Whale Hunt [narrative] Installation of narrative paintings.
“A boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly, enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant. Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through.- It's the Black Sea in a midnight gale.- It's the unnatural combat of the four primal elements.- It's a blasted heath.- It's a Hyperborean winter scene.- It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time. ” Herman Melville (from Moby Dick)
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own;t [textual work]
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." John 1:1
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.” John Maynard Keynes
"Half of what I say is meaningless
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Framing Structures [Minimal architectures]
Alfred Lord Tennyson
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Home-cosmographies [multi-channel compositions] The Stacked images begin as a paper divided into a grid and which are then seperated into into two one-point-perspective cubes stacked one upon the other. Zones are created and defined by different combinations of patterns. The Composed images add other elements into the multi-channel compositions, allowing for more relations of various spaces, images, and icons. “Direct your eye right inward, and you’ll find a thousand regions of your mind yet undiscovered. Travel them and be expert in home-cosmography.” “[B]e a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.” Henry David Thoreau
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Human Natures [landscape painting] Images that record those moments after momentously disastrous acts have been symmetrically repeated to become classically balanced. "The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water." Eugene Ionesco
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A Travesty of Termination [performative installation] Installation, drawings, and performance were based around the tradition of a murder mystery and the viewers were invited to guess which family member terminated the maid. Many people made very rational and reasoned guesses, but only one person picked the right suspect. It helped that he submitted guesses about more than half of the family.
"The Red Queen shook her head, 'You may call it 'nonsense' if you like,' she said, 'but I've heard nonsense, compared with which that would be as sensible as a dictionary!'" Lewis Carroll
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Conglomerate Board A board game made at the same time as the Travesty of Termination was being conceived. It is a mixture of drawn metaphors upon the structure of a chessboard.
"NATURE hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind as that, though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself." Hobbes
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Apaches* [modular paintings] A complex shape that had a loaded connotation and could be fractured quite easily. A base for exploring signification in stroke, color, and texture combinations in which meaning is created. This is complicated further by the changing contexts of the surrounding helicopters. The more paintings that are assembled, the quicker the eye makes out that complex shape, but at the same time the increasing combinations of color, stroke, and texture make the meaning more convoluted.
"What therefore, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms;…truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions." Nietzsche as quoted by Spivak
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Freedom Flies [political painting]
“Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.” George W. Bush
Apache Indians fought the United States Military for land, resources, and self-determination. While at this time Apache, Comanche, and Blackhawk Indian tribes were deemed 'savages', their names were later appropriated by the US Military for their allusions to American bravery and fierceness in battle. The Apache Longbow ™ Attack Helicopter was first deployed in Operation Just Cause (Panama, 1989), then subsequently in Operation Desert Storm (Iraq, 1990), Operation Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan, 2001), and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq, 2003). As of June 6, 2009 there has been documentation of between 92,300 and 100,775 civilian deaths from violence in Iraq according to iraqbodycount.org.
"When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." Lewis Carroll
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| © 2000-2011, all works, Geoffrey Owen Miller. |