psychic tension

What started out as an exersize with equiluminant colors, to discuss vibration, movement, and the diffuculty of seeing, quickly turned into a revelation about the psychic tension of living in an increasingly crowded and complicated world.
Post-modern theory has taught us that “grand narratives”, as a way to organize everything with one giant meta-structure, keep failing and that more organic growth and organization seem to progress at initially disorganized rates. The disorganiztion, the chaos, have patterns (sometimes vague, sometimes strong) that trick us into thinking that we can find an overall pattern and see the organiztion of everything.

Using Jackson Pollacks more (in)famous works of large abstract expressionist paintings as an example, we see that the structure is scattered and seemingly random. But, paint marks are thrown with similar motions as the artist worked around the canvas repeating the action of painting. There is an order within the disorder, but one that cannot be easily explained without the formulas of fractal geometry. I use the familiar splash mark as a sign of this chaotic painting technique and choose to repeat it with the screen instead of my hand. Each repetition is nearly identical to the last so I am free to move the mark in a less ordered fashion.

This freedom allows me to imagine more possibilities. Unfortunately, more possibilities only leads to even more possibilities. This is indictitive of the psychic tension created by all of the luxuries and freedoms that we have in this modern (or “post-modern”?) era. As the western world has moved through a multitude of government organiztions towards finding a perfect solution (“the answer”) we have discovered that one solution might not be the best, and certainly is not the only solution. In deconstruction the reasons why perfetion evades us many people give up and either go to the disco or go shopping.

But, the need to have something still exists. We can only drop out for so long before wanting to fill the void. Today (un)fortunately we have more colors, models, choices as consumers of physical products as well as information so the quest for any kind of truth (or possibilities of truth) is easily distracted by another consumer product.

Many of possibilities exist. Millions of consumer products. Many of ways to spend free time. Many ways to think about what to do next. Many ways to surf the same wave. Many ways to paint the same painting or make the same print. Many colors from which to choose. How do we know what to choose?

I chose through both favoritism, accident, and some color associations with movement and water. I stopped because I ran out of paper.