Artist Statement

My work falls within systems aesthetics. What I make is evaluated the way Jack Burnham proposed in 1968: by its inputs, its outputs and its relational structure rather than by its material properties. The lineage runs through Agnes Denes, who mapped the processes of thought on graph paper, plotting evolution, time and truth as continuous forms, and named the practice Visual Philosophy; through Joseph Beuys, who drew his Energy Plan for the Western Man on blackboards and treated creativity, society and meaning as flows of energy and warmth passing through works of art; and back to Marcel Duchamp, who worked directly on the systems within art and cognition with the readymades, and who named the gap between what an artist intends and what the work expresses, the art coefficient, across which the spectator completes the creative act.

One principle runs through all of my works. Truth persists through circulation. A truth that circulates, agitated by the other variables flowing through the system and incorporating what returns, keeps its shape because the circulation keeps validating it; a truth cut off from that circulation degrades into dogma, not because its content changed but because its topology did. I call this the convection of validation. My works exist within this entangled topology. As an artist I am merely pulling the threads to see what it reveals.

Encounter

In the charcoal room and the large-format drawings the lines guide the eye without resolving it, and every visitor sees something different. The scale of the work exceeds the visual field, so the image disentangles at the periphery; composition, and the play of high and low contrast, give the eye direction. Together these give the work a sense of causality, and therefore a narrative, whose resolution the drawing withholds. That is the Rorschach principle at work. An ambiguous mark is a signal in its high-entropy state, doing no work in itself; the mind takes it and rapidly hallucinates a pattern from its own schema, converting an anergic signal into cognitive exergy, into work capacity. The schema is the conversion apparatus. The work the artwork does is the conversion the viewer's schema performs on it, which is why the same wall holds a different drawing for each person who stands in front of it.

Structure

A drawing of all art that has ever been or will be began as a refusal: asked to write a thesis about art, which resists definition, I drew its formula instead. From a small set of axioms, the morphology of manifolds, the formula of visible colour, thermodynamics as the formula of intelligence, the systems of emotion, a single drawing generates every work that has been made or could be made. It was performed on a chalkboard at my MFA defence, walked through aloud, questioned and corrected at the board, and erased; the object that exists now is a facsimile made years later, an incomplete memory. It is the abstraction the schema realises, drawn as the system it describes.

Body

where does the sadness lie, gregg bordowitz takes its title from a question of Bordowitz's: a sad artist paints and a viewer feels sad, so where does the sadness lie, in the artist, the painting or the viewer? For a year I kept every tear I shed in grief. Dried, the salt became the seed of a crystal grown in a supersaturated solution: a year of grief spawning a form of its own. The somatic register is a primary register of exergy processing in its own right, alongside cognition and emotion rather than downstream of them: tears, goosebumps, the shiver at a chord are the body processing exergy, and at times completing a conversion that cognition could not. What the body discharges is anergy at the scale of one mind and exergy at the scale of two: the tear is involuntary, and so legible, and so does its work in whoever sees it. The crystal is that processing given time enough to become a form.

Map

The Ethics of Entropy is my doctoral research: an expanding field of more than two thousand atomic ideas and the relations between them, mapped onto a hyperbolic disk by the framework's own principles and run as a thermodynamics: exergy entering at the sources, anergy pooling at the open questions, reconversion at the bridges where one field's set-aside question becomes another's working premise, reorganisation or collapse at the fold, and the nested return of validation to the core concepts it re-grounds. The most connected idea, the one the geometry places nearest the centre, is the convection of validation. The framework is operating on itself, complete only to the edge of its own frame. The large charcoal drawings composed on hyperbolic structure, and the polished steel iteration that follows them, belong to the same map.

Entanglement

A system cannot validate itself from within. Each of these works is a boundary, porous by design, nested in the systems that hold it: the room, the practice, the research, and the outside reality of matter, ideas, mathematics and other minds from which returns arrive. Its state is entangled with that environment; what the work is depends on what flows through it. Your attention enters the work as validation and places it, from outside, within the boundary of an artistic practice. That entanglement is the fifth station, and it is the one the work cannot supply for itself.