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CONSTANCE A LOWE
Artist's Statement
My work uses imagery derived from ink blots to explore the slippery nature of perception, imagination, and meaning and to reflect my material and conceptual interests in re-production, the agency of color, and (broadly speaking) the intersection of art and science. My body of work consists of drawings in colored pencil on drafting film, sewn felt pieces, and, most recently, painting. All aspects of my work contrast labor-intensive construction with the idiosyncratic contours of the image through fastidious methods of reproduction and fabrication.
The ink blot is a “found” image, without an actual model in the physical world, that suggests a multitude of representations. As the ink blot is a “doubled” image, the drawings are also literally doubled. That is, each is actually two basically identical drawings, one on each side of the film. This strategy intensifies the color and allows for a broader color range. I aim to evoke a sense of incidental color created by genetic coding and mutation, psychic disorder or hallucinatory states, overlaying notions of the “natural”, “unnatural”, and “artificial”. Currently I am beginning to use digital imaging as an intermediary step between drawings and between drawing and painting to produce more “irrational” color than I could otherwise envision. This move has also brought me back to painting as an additional means to realize these new, complex chromatic arrangements
The sewn felt pieces animate and give additional physical presence to the image, adding another dimension of experience to my body of work. Collectively, these various layers of visual experience enact an imaginative space between abstraction and representation, the psyche and the external world, picture and object to make visible a condition in which clear identification or categorization is evaded, making room for something else entirely to occur and take on its own life.
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