How many ways can you say something usual differently? There’s a term called tautology that generally means redundancy or saying the same thing too many times. When you get to a certain level of perception, you start seeing all the interrelated patterns and how everything is truly interconnected. The patterns you see repeat themselves ad infinitum.
This evening, I revisited the first images I made from my Wrecked Tangles (Encircled) series. When I started this series back in 2011, I ordered each group alphabetically. So there was the Wrecked Tangles (Encircled) A series, B series, C series, and so forth. This image, titled Swing, I just worked on tonight. The material I used to make it came from the Wrecked Tangles (Encircled) A series. It is a new addition to the series.
For those of you who don’t know what my Wrecked Tangles series are all about, I’ll explain briefly here. First of all, it’s a play on words—that is, wrecked tangles played upon the word “rectangles.” The word “encircled” means I sometimes employ the usage of circles with the predominately rectangular shapes that compose the series. I’m trying to give a colorful expression to rectangular shapes and objects in various stages of entropy through abstract designs.
I wanted to use the most basic shapes for a very extensive art project. This project would mostly be done online through an online or virtual gallery. So really, Wrecked Tangles is a sort of tautology, but the expressions are visual instead of verbal.
The first drawing I produced for the A series was a good start for the direction I wanted to take the project in. The very first drawing I produced for the project didn’t include the cut-out material, nor the block letter text I later started employing. I feel that my drawings got too confined, and less entropic—not more—within the rectangular patterns I subsequently created after the A series. It’s like the entropic process occurred in reverse with this project; a result I had not intended.
Swing is the title, as I mentioned, of this image. The founding drawing consists of pastel on paper. Quite simple really. And that is good. While it can be fun to experiment with a multitude of mediums, I think it’s better to keep to simpler patterns, mediums, colors, and media for a series. It’s titled Swing because it looks like a hammer that’s swung around a fulcrum. Perhaps it’s a human powered fulcrum that’s swinging the hammer, while appearing as if there are four hammers from the motion of the swing.
It is a colorful cry for labor, as computers, robots, and artificial intelligence replace human labor in the 21st century. It’s a symbolic gesture of man destroying his own labor by creating detached, soulless labor to replace himself through mechanisms, programs, and automatons. The process of entropy doesn’t happen solely by natural means, nor exclusively by traditionally humanly destructive means, but by abstract and “intelligent” means as well.
Art of eVan 