"In The Woods, We Return" was the title of my Senior Project exhibition at FGCU last April. The work was unlike anything I had done before, a multimedia installation which dealt with several issues - the sublime, the term "beauty", the question what actually makes a sacred space sacred, abstraction and adding a time-based element to the medium of painting being the most prominent ones. A big part of the class, which is supposed to be one's crowning achievement after four years of undergrad work, is to generate writing about the work, laying out the concepts the artist worked with, as well as putting oneself into an art-historical context. I'd like to publish two of the main texts - the brief artist statement and the longer research review - here in this blog. There'll be pictures, too.
Oh, and check out a short video of the original installation at my youtube page www.youtube.com/philipheubeck.
installation as seen from the outside
In The Woods, We Return - Artist Statement
“In the woods, we return to reason and faith ... My head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”, 1841
This work is essentially about inner silence. It provides a secular sacred space, an environment set apart from everyday life, where visitors can be quiet, humble, contemplative, or simply observant. In the absence of religious context, my goal was to create the feeling of being in the presence of the sublime by means of a multimedia installation. The quote which inspired the title of my work is taken from Emerson’s essay “Nature”, and it is indeed the simple yet infinitely complex beauty of nature that will make this space an environment that transcends the time spent in it. The intent of the work is to display these natural processes and basic material qualities in an objective way, enabling the viewers to add their own meaning and to finish the work with their own perceptions of spirituality.
It has always been my desire to make art that resonates deeply with the viewer. Although I love contemporary art for the formal freedoms it gives us, I have always looked back at the works produced in centuries gone by, envying them for their selflessness, their seriousness and their profound meaning. “In The Woods, We Return” is therefore, on its most idealistic level, a deliberate attempt at beauty and content, a turning away from the anti-aesthetic tendencies of the recent past and an exercise in artistic discipline and careful realization. I consider the experience of beauty to be something very individual and intimate, so ideally the viewer should spend a considerable amount of time alone with the work.
The project evolved over a long period of time and marks a personal breakthrough for me and for the progress of my art work. My abstract acrylic paintings have always been about letting the paint behave as naturally as possible, and by using film I am now able to make the painting process itself (rather than the final result) the subject of the work. The inclusion of video in the project marked the moment from which everything fell into place. Having this organic abundance of color permeating the entire space finally allowed me to paint a series of white paintings with various surface structures - something I have wanted to do for a while – to interact with the projection by receiving and thus coming alive. The audio collage within the installation contains a range of subtle, everyday sounds in combination with the altered atmospheric sound that a sensitive microphone detects in a tin can.
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