As sentient beings we use our brains constantly on many levels. In addition to navigating our environment, as in trying to avoid tripping over things (or our feet), we are continuously parsing information in an attempt to understand and protect ourselves from harm, from potential emotional damage, to feel a sense of mastery, calm and as part of our ceaseless mission to find experiences that spark the pleasure centers of the mind.

 

It is the same within the art world. The need to contain, categorize and explain. All the ‘-isms’, currently unfashionable, are attempts to gather, understand and also package and market groups of artists work. It is also an attempt by the intelligentsia and the media to codify something that can rarely be codified. The mental/physical experience inherent in the act of creation, its consequences and the everlasting need to label. Or as Donald Judd once tartly opined, ‘Instead of thinking about each person’s work, critics invent labels to pad their irrelevant discourse’.

 

AF/FA or Abstract/Figurative - Figurative/Abstract, the new show opening on Friday, September 30th at Eonta Space for JCAST weekend, features work that moves back and forth between the descriptions cited. The title of the show uses words that are understandable and reasonable and yet looking at the work they provoke a dialogue, or quadralogue between what we are seeing, how we describe what we are seeing and what our brains do with the words our brains choose to describe the work before us.

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