Sometimes
I find a tiny patch of color no bigger than a fingernail out
of place in the world, and it demands attention. It's a tiny,
isolated island of detail screaming from the mud, from the side
of a house or a tree or the bumper of a car. The more I look
at this
shard of life, the more it reveals to me. It provides a living,
real-time visual experience.
It will eventually
become familiar, but then I'll see it under different
circumstances one day and something new will occur to me. The
life of the experience is self-sustaining.
My understanding
of the object develops in ways that mirror my understanding
of life. In that sense, the object becomes a kind of living thing.
I think
of each
work in the
Unknown Culture series as both idiomatic of my personal
culture, and by extension an artifact of the larger aesthetic
culture we share.
It takes
on metaphorically the identity of a culture in the biological
sense of a
colony of microorganisms.
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