Vicarious

Helen Steinecke
Oct 8, 2014 6:14PM

The exhibit, Vicarious, started as a rough grouping of works I personally found aesthetically appealing. When I took the time to sit back and think of why I had chosen them I realized that all of the pieces deal with both form and time. Even in the pieces that are wholly abstract, such as Diamonds, 45/50 and Higher Being III, time and form are intrinsic in their make up. This realization set me to thinking about why those two things had caught my eye, especially when I was presented with a wealth of art that worked with those themes as well as other ideas and principles that I knew.

Form and Time are perhaps the most present aspects of the human experience. For most if not all of our lives we are aware of the rest of the world through our body, beholden to its aches and pains but also a recipient of its pleasures. And time, though often seen as working against our form by nature, can dictate our choices, our actions and reactions. Even thinking of time can be for some too much to bear, and it is due to its ever present, ever moving coldness.

But why Form and Time in this exhibit?

Outside of expressing what the artist has to say, art’s goal is in some sense to imitate life. At times it’s representing feeling and idea in abstraction, sometimes it even rales against its purpose as a representational medium. But for all that art expresses the artist’s meaning through means that are hoped to make the viewer understand the meaning.

And so to see Form and Time, the linked parts that compose so much of the act of living, explored here in different shapes and moments is meant to open the viewer’s eye to the life within art, given by the artist but lived by the piece itself. Vicarious is about art living through the eyes of the artist.

Helen Steinecke