Malcolm Bonney

Artist's statement

1. The surface of experience controls our conflation of the self, rather than inner dynamics of natural law or human logic. The paradigm is that getting too close to a subject is a pretty sure way of emptying it of any meaning. A place transforms a memory. With the expressive potential of complex materials such as wax and sack cloth against wood, I reorder the world of experiences not to transform, yet to redirect.

2. I used Bertolt Brecht technique, controling the meaning of an image with functional captions (neologism), the process of attaching bits of prescriptive language to visual images. The visual can be reduced to the verbal, thus images are textual, permitting certainty. Shifting from gertural to scriptural. I look for stanardization of meaning and the leveling of intentions. My work is about perception of past works that carry on an idea. Horses, the promise of freedom, train tracks the promise of escape, and disengaged wheels, incapablity to get anywhere.

3. My work delves into the dual aspects of reality to convey the absence as I reveal the present in themes that bracket a narritive thread. All form is revealed by the oppositions and the force field between nature and the mind.

a. desire / fear

b. shelter / entrapment

c. need / addiction

d . l o v e / h a t e

4. Form was a reaction in the material point of departure. Still points of a turning world. (T.S. Elliot) witness to collective meaning. Work became objects of contemplation to render tuneful, a dialectical materialism.

5. I personalize reality at the edge of a particular writer or concept for one year. Interactive flux of memory and perception, a willing act of thought, nonrepresentational yet spatially illusionistic.

G.B. Shaw “Institutions collapse from lack of funding, they do not die from lack of meaning, we do.