Excerpt: Painting, Exile and Return (The New Frontiers of Modernity)
Project #10
The homo viator nomadic and transforming ideas and signs, transporting them from one point to another. “All modernity is vehicular, exchange based, and translative in its essence; the variety apparently announcing its arrival today will become more extreme as it develops, for the first time in human history, on a planetary scale” (Bourriaud, 2009, p. 22).
… Clarifying my position as a painter in this century has been significantly effected by the influences of the artists and theories I have explored. My painting practice has evolved over this period of study and has moved me into an embodied position, where space and machinated form predominate. The performance of paint, its materiality and temporality primarily drives my practice. The layers of sound and duration in the recordings of historical musical works and the re-working, mixing and overlapping of these aural pieces has brought my passion for musicality into the present. I am driven by the performance of the paint and I have an ever increasing interest in bringing it further into space and time-specific formats. The altermodern manifesto is strategic to my current project based practice and supplies me with many concepts and strategies on which to formulate future work.
My practice is now reshaped and transformed. My process has become project based. The title of this project derives from the ten stages of development and enterprise my process has gone through, to arrive at this point. This incorporates every influence and peripheral activity under one umbrella and shifts the focus away from painting as the primary activity. The axis of the project, which is the production of transportable painted surfaces, is motivated by performance of paint and sound, echoing the language of painting to incorporate flow or flux. The depth and breadth of the project is infinite as it develops strands of activity that can branch out via the internet to the global community.
My investigations were initially focussed on finding a suitable mechanised and ready made platform on which to display painted vinyl records. The movement of paint had been the most significant outcome of my investigations to date and if painting is to continue in my practice then the movement of the substance must be incorporated into process. It seemed perfect to be considering old turntables which I felt, depending on the availability of supply, could best suit my needs to activate the painted surface. I wanted the materiality of paint to be in motion rather than static, animate rather than inanimate, and ultimately temporal in its performance motion and duration.
Belcher, R. (2009). Painting, Exile and Return (The New Frontiers of Modernity) Unpublished MFA dissertation. Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design, Auckland, New Zealand.
Bourriaud, N. (Ed.). (2009). Altermodern. Tate Triennial. London: Tate Publishing.