infinite nowhere: on texts, trails, and speaking to place
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Date
2017
Authors
Linn, Ronald
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Abstract
I am of the practice of trying, often failing.
My practice attempts to navigate the territories between dichotomies of text/image, image/object, meditation and direct experience, interior and exterior space. I am interested in how this repeated attempt relates to the idea of ritual. At its core, ritual is an act of futility, but in its reenactment it opens a new space of meaning succeeding at something else instead. Drawing is ritual, walking another. As with walking, the locus of drawing is found in desire for or lack of: of wanting to take the next step, to see where the line will lead; of attempting to call back lost experience; of seeing a place for the first time, knowing that you can never reclaim that moment. Through acts of meditative intervention, I explore the spaces (and non-spaces) we create for ourselves, the stories we tell and inhabit, the desire to transcend the boundaries of our bodies and our reason. I wonder how one might speak to place, rather than simply about it. What language might we even use to bridge such a divide? The question is perhaps unanswerable, but this urge to connect and its ultimate failure lies at the crux of my practice.
My work is a performative act that yields objects of labor, artifacts that are meant to convey a meaning incapable of being shared. We often place our faith in objects to clasp meaning and memory, to hold them somehow fixed within tangible bounds, and yet where we usually end up is at the beginning again: a desire for connection and an internal landscape that is in many ways more real than the actual thing.
Description
72 pages