NOT JUST LIKE THIS, BUT LIKE THIS, OR THIS, OR THIS …

Our experience of life as observed by our limited faculties and skills show it to be complex, confusing and over-determined. But we’re capable of shaping, refining, reducing, decorating, and twisting what happens around us into an acceptable image or object. Often, and with only a slight shift, the image or object or formula is then taken to be a truth, an absolute.

This habitual activity is the arena in which I work. I look for the multiples that a singular image contains—all of which are equally valid, but most of which are ignored. I don’t aim to produce a more ‘truthful’ paradigm, formula or explanation, or to tidy up the given image. I take an existing, commonly known or evident image and pull it apart, show how it is partial, and expand it. I do this through three procedures:

  1. outlier or extra-curricular parts of the image are embraced;
  2. the logic of the given image is taken to its limits and sometimes beyond;
  3. I make many new images, all of them within the logic of the original image.

The arbitrary nature of the initial image becomes evident from this activity. Because the original given and socialised images/objects are to some degree already a creative work, my works are creative extensions of them, but critically so. This critique re-figures the relationship between the over-determined source and its reduced representation.

At the same time, I know that an image must become a useful fiction so that life can flourish. Although it may be an arbitrary concoction, it must be agreed to, if not by everyone, then by most of us. Festivals and periodic rituals often function as a display of the arbitrariness of such images, where they are played with and celebrated before we return to the zones of useful fiction.

Projects which clearly take up this theme are

  1. The monotones, which take a single word, ‘monotone’, conventionally used to describe a reduced, unchanging circumstance, and reworks it through typographic and drawn compositions to exhibit abundance, variety and difference.
  2. 1 to 9, which uses a grid of numbers (abstracted from a small illustration of a medieval maze) as the structuring diagram for a range of poems, graphics, texts and architectural projects. The structural pattern appears in many art traditions, so any/all of my works using that pattern are in dialogue with those.
  3. The Innisfail Section, which is an architectural figure explored through models and drawings. As in the 1 to 9 works, all new works are in dialogue with all other examples of this architectural figure found all over Australia, and sometimes elsewhere.
  4. Rivers of Light, which takes the unwanted vertical line of white that sometimes appears in typesetting and which tricks the eyes into flowing down the text rather than across it. Typographers call this line a river of white and try to remove it when it occurs. I exploit its effects which links a text to the space of the page and its potential state of whiteness. White is an allusive quality of some complexity for us, particularly when it is embodied in paper.
  5. The Southern Cross, in which the acceptance of the fifth star (as shown on our national flag) and use of the usual constellational rules of joining points and NOT crossing lines, generates many non-cruxic versions of the Southern Cross. It shifts the Euro-Catholic interpretation of the constellation to a secular profusion.
  6. Purgatorio explores a fortuitous description of Australia written in the early 1300s using a medieval model of purgatory as a mountain in the southern hemisphere. This model is used to structure various kinds of works, including some suites and sets, and is finally translated to modern Australia as an epic poem.
  7. Mack’s Stack, in which a pile of die-cut cardboard pieces, meant to be folded into cup-cake holders is folded in alternate ways along its given grooves to produce many sculptural variations, some of which are more elegant cupcake holders than the intended original, and some of which are humorous objects.

Most of these projects result in a cloud of similar-looking objects, especially if restricted to the same medium and material over the range of works. Exceptions are Innisfail, Purgatorio and Floats, where the variations and different versions slip from media to media and produce works of quite different appearance and presence.

Alex Selenitsch
November, 2024