Workings, Writings, All things interesting (to me)
—–“I have arrived at the surface and can take the dimension of a living body. But I shall use the dimension from which I shall create the new. I have released all the birds from the eternal cage, and opened the gates to the animals in zoological gardens.”
-K. Malevich
Digital Ink Jet Print Mounted on Drywall
Through my processes I am trying to engage with my past and memories as a child and the deteriorating enigma of where I come from and what makes you the way you are. The photographs can reveal so much yet never always the entire instant. It can become muddled with the passage of time. I look back as a way to move forward within myself. My memories may be the truest thing that can be exercised. Although the memories may fail and be mere emotional constructions of what really happened on these days. However they are my constructions and no one else’s. Some and often times I cannot remember anything at all. The images are simply a moment forgotten. No way for me to enter them other than knowing I was there and not ever really being there. The images would show this but with out them that memory lives in the vessel of the individual’s mind. As for the choices of imagery, I have been tending to focus on the innocence of childhood, the naive of being young and un aware of the world, as a body learning day to day. This makes for the emptiness of knowledge of me as a child a point of departure, because I have been filling the mind of me as a child with all I have learned thus far. I want to have a conversation with these moments, they live so closely to my heart in various ways. My family’s relationship has been playing a big role in my mind, reconstructing their love and what it meant to them and the way I saw it then and the clearer way I see it now through photographs. What has this taught me, what can teach anyone if anything at all? My destructions of the photographic Image is my way to approach memory as a construction in itself, it takes the form of the present object philosophically through the choice of my materials. The past is absolute, it can not be re visited physically in time and space. It can only be re made and re purposed for the present. So the past is the catalyst to my present work, its re visited as a means to gain insight to my process and myself. I look back to go forward and my work re-constructs these moments only to be broken down yet again.
Ellie Ga “The Fortunetellers”
“The Fortunetellers began in 2007 when I was the artist-in-residence for a scientific expedition near the North Pole. For five months I was on board Tara, a sailboat that was drifting in the frozen pack ice of the Arctic Ocean.” -Ellie GA
In the waters below swimming side by side their significant other, whether in love or not, they are bound to each other. Out of their own will they will swim side by side with one and the other. Does it take love to keep them together in a symbiotic relation? Does it ever take love or just understanding of one another? Realizing the eternal justice of their lives as the others stand together side by side above them in their cells. To love is a tempting yet terrifying idea, its not so simple to embody your mind in it’s caresses. Soon becoming engulfed within it. It should be the joinery to keep the foundations together, but in hailstorms and earthquakes of the mind this is not always possible. It should not be understood as an eternal feeling, it can break and wear along the edges and yes it can fail you. For the fishes beneath the ark in the abyss of the silent waters, they have the choice to swim away and break off to start their own new world and become in themselves the creators of their own destiny. They’re bodies are not enamored in the body of the world of the architect or being, but free to choose their own geometries. The currents only are perpendicular at one point then equaled out into three, in the directions of their choice. Where these currents meet is a point of total peace and their love will be embraced and blemished in one another. Only once will they meet there, and for a brief time.
Pre-dating my knowledge of the existential and the knowledge of my personality, I hadn’t yet gotten anywhere close to even contemplating the nature of my purpose and what my purpose would entail, no notions of god or the dying and sick and what that means to be human. The animal sleeps alone, I work alone, the marks left in the walls of my mind, the signifiers of the past as a means to gain further concepts of the present. They are taken to sleep and eat alone. Behind structured vessels we contain our knowledge in vitrines and sign posts we gather information from their confinement. Our memories are forces guided back to the present in times of need and comfort or in times of hate and discourse. We need them at times we feel unabridged to the next moment. They have made us who we are, it comes as no surprise I would be so interested in re-locating and presenting the past. The captive beasts captured my imagination and while in captive captivated me. So much we don’t know if we don’t get out if we don’t lend our feet to be pressed to the unfamiliar. So much we would not know if not reminded of where we came and how that has changed the methods of our actions. Looking back can sometimes push the optimism of the growing and expanding inflating present. They can haunt and be the frequented bothers, but so little would be gained if all our memoirs were never orated in one form or another. The captivated beasts captivated me and they’re uncertainty only made me and continue to make me wonder and dream more and more.
Dan Hojnacki; Art/Photography 