westlake72
Profile
My interventions and installations employ a variety of media and strategies including text, sound, print and oral discourse as means of open communication. This praxis occupies a space informed by a theoretical position that views creative practice as, in essence, a process of affirmation through communication, and a theological position, based on research into negative theology and zen buddhism, that authentic emancipation can only be experienced outside of languages’ binary-structures. This raises a central ethical aporia existing as the fulcrum of my practice: communication without a communicated – it being inevitable that in any communication a something will be, or will be perceived to be, communicated, and that this something cannot avoid enmeshment within a network of linguistic systemization; a process antipathetic to authentic liberation.This central paradox is negotiated as a space transcending our network of binary-oppositions is opened up through an exploration of the (im)possibilities of a purely phatic mode of communication. This privileging of absence over presence acts as a tactic of destabilization occpying a meditative gap existing in the relationship between linguistic cognition and, what we might term, the Absolute or noumenon. Often employing language itself as a pharmacia, I embrace the aesthetic issues that arise in semi-dematerialized practice by appropriating the the syntax of modernist graphic design and minimalism while exploiting the ephemera of the everyday – i.e our everyday existence within advanced capitalist societies. By creating explicitly open-work the production of a horizontal and anti-authoritarian sphere of engagement is facilitated.
Groups
westlake72 is a member of A T-Shirt Revolution, Agent Provocateur - T-Shirts with Messages, All Text T's, Alternative and Progressive International Art, Anticonsumerism, ART ACTION UNION - CREATIVE ACTIVISM, Art And Text, Blast from the Past, Have Your Say on TShirts, Minimalism and Underground USA.
