Ravelling Enunciations
Timothy Jude Smith
10 - 18.8.2018
Visiting dates: 10 - 18 August, 15.00 - 20.00
Reception: 16 August, 17.00 - 20.00
FB event: https://www.facebook.com/events/629109380822235
Ravelling Enunciations is an expanding artwork and evolving pedagogical project that consists of large-scale collages created from informational diagrams removed from their original sources of natural science and social science texts. All language, symbols, and formulas have been digitally removed from each diagram. The resulting work is a constellation of thousands of non-art images that interweave and proliferate into seemingly nonsensical forms.
When all linguistic and scientific formula/symbol/number information is masked from each diagram, what is left behind is an assemblage of new forms reconfiguring drawings and graphics that have served as illustrations contributing to universal and rational knowledge of modernity. Through its active ‘delinking’ and reorienting of these images from their initial meanings and use-functions, collage becomes a mode for engaging non-rational but meaningful connections through the creation of new aesthetic forms, tableaus, and narratives.
The word ‘ravel’ can mean both to unravel or disentangle and to tangle or entangle. While the diagrams are disentangled from their original rational scientific meanings, they are also re-entangled into new contexts. They have the potential that create multiversal and productively non-rational meanings through a practice that embraces ‘enunciation’ over representation. Enunciation is a cartographical practice that decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo calls “a world that is constantly invented” rather than one that relies on what is fixed or preexisting. Similarly, but from a western philosophical view, Gilles Deleuze views enunciations as expressions that disarticulate and deterritorialize the universal, normative and hegemonic territory of the root tree of universal knowledge. For Deleuze, the non-image of the rhizome is not one that replaces or effaces the tree of western representation, but rather it emerges, skews, subverts, disrupts, and invents nonsense that traverses and weaves in and out of the universal knowledge, and creates of as-of-yet known knowledges.
Throughout the duration of the exhibition, visitors are welcome to contribute to a collective creation of a digital collage in the gallery space. This collaborative element of the exhibition fosters the engagement of an ‘exquisite corpse’-like exercise that will build a collage from one another’s creations. This optional viewer participation reflects the pedagogical component of digital artmaking that I often teach through my secondary and university art education practice.
Timothy Jude Smith is an artist, researcher, and educator based in Helsinki as a post-doctoral researcher at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. He previously lectured at Ohio State University, where he received an MFA in Visual Art in 2012, and a PhD in Art Education in 2016. His art-based research and teaching primarily focuses on art and activism, with an emphasis on the ethics of critical posthumanist and (neo)humanist approaches to socially-engaged art practices and pedagogy.
https://timothyjudesmith.com/
