WORK: artist’s

The following is reproduced from a project on VerySmallKitchen:

I am very much interested in certain relationships between image and text. This interest is not only concerned with final forms, or products, but also with the processes “drawing” and “writing” through which the results are arrived at. I see parallels between grammatical structure and delineated form, especially within the sort of mental and physical groping exercised when working toward their refinement. The pictorial and verbal connections I attempt to handle in my practice are often nebulous at best, yet apparent enough for me to negotiate conceptually. However, once momentum has died down and all that remains is the final draft – the residue of process – it is the specifics of fiction, with its requisite plot and character(s), which tie together disparate visual and textual elements. Formally disconnected images band into a unified series through a titling system which reads like excerpts from an overarching narrative. At the same time, uncertain illustrational relationships between text and a visually cohesive set of images can be reinforced through the repetitive application of narrative continuity.

Tadeusz & Gregory are most certainly fictional, and possess potential for fluid identity. The idea of Tadeusz & Gregory is an intentionally vague set of relationships which can be played with in a variety of ways. Regardless of what is written about them, Tadeusz & Gregory may or may not be alike Mason and Dixon, Mason & Dixon, Harrison and Wood (but neither Harrison nor Wood), Reeves & Mortimer, Mark and Jeremy, or any of countless other (and not necessarily British) duos. However, Tadeusz & Gregory are definitely self-serious intellectuals whose research, of no fixed academic discipline, is likely insignificant to both their peers and the population at large. Yet the pair carry on while maintaining an impeccable work ethic. In turn, they celebrate their achievements and bemoan their failures.

Tadeusz & Gregory’s pairing as a duo carries with it the expectation of an act or routine. The nature of this enacted relationship is informed by what is committed in writing about the two colleagues, but is also influenced by expectations carried over from popular culture. The implied missing, or extra, identifying narrative information that is inherently present in excerption as a format lends itself to the malleability of the two characters’ association. This facilitates the conceit of the Excerpts series: that the titles are written as though excerpted from a greater completed story. However, there is largely no premeditated continuity in Excerpts. Thus flexibility in both the identity and interactive tendencies of the characters is useful for allowing the introduction or de-emphasis of landmarks and trajectories within the expanding fiction. And because the drawing and writing are so structurally and procedurally interwoven, enabling verbal improvisation encourages similar leeway in the realm of the pictorial.