Stories are told with words and images using familiar text and pictures. The notion that art can possess a sense of “storytelling" through layers of readings concerning a visual text that is read simultaneously as letter form symbols as well as an image, is a phenomenon that my archival pieces "Marginalia: Waxing Philosophical" have sought to explore.
I have increasingly focused on a text-based approach to my art as a natural evolution of my professional background in Graphic Design, which provided me with an appreciation for typography and the inherent beauty of individual letterforms. As well, my experience has made me aware of the aesthetic and creative power of the printed word as text, that can be simultaneously experienced as symbols with meaning, and as abstract image.
My primary interest lies with the exploration and preservation of memory, experience and the conventional notions we attach to these human traits as they relate to the physical landscape and the sub-conscious mind.
The human view of our place in the cosmos is inextricably bound-up in a dialectic conflict between subjective and objective elements, which contend for supremecy in the mind. By combining visual order and simultaneous chaos, it is my hope that an image will emerge from this dialectic synthesis that is uniquely the concern of the viewer.
With respect to my work with photographic double portrait images in “About Face”, I seek to unmask visually a reference to human behaviour in general, in particular the ways in which we constantly and meticulously maintain an illusion about ourselves to ourselves… The work in this sense may act upon the viewer in a mode of psychological deconstructionism that presents again my pre-occupation with themes of layering of our psyche, memory and a physical palimpsest that each human being actually is, both figuratively and literally. Each of us presents ourselves to the world in a very aesthetically and therefore artistically contrived manner… much as if we view ourselves as a work of art in progress, albeit sometimes lacking in conventional aesthetic ideals.
A recent project of mine entitled “Archive", uses text-based imagery that explores the notion of a palimpsest in which layers of ink-jet imaged ancient text, are overprinted with my own extensive and very personal journal writings that represent my reactions to the underlying text. The original ancient writings that inspired my thoughts are effectively overwritten by my own hand so to speak, in a process that results in a partial revealing and obscuring of both textual layers simultaneously. This essentially produces an image that is formed of layered words and letterforms, which together both enhance and defeat the viewer’s reading of the text… a reading which is augmented through my personal journal and margin notes, and frustrated by means of the layering effect. The random and chaotic presentation of the subject matter in the text sheets simultaneously reveals and conceals their true content, and are in this sense parallel in respects to the complex and contradictory nature of human beings themselves.
Archive, owing to its composition consisting of individually unique modular sheets, can be arranged in a wide variety of different 3D installations. It is through the medium of printed text, that I have been able to explore the inherent potential of text-based imagery and its rather mysterious capacity to evoke mental “pictures" in the mind of the viewer from out of nothing — ex-nihilo as it were. It is precisely this mysterious ability of text to generate meaning in the mind of the viewer across the intervening intellectual / metaphysical space, through the act of reading, which intrigues me the most about my investigations in art. The effect that is created between the sign and the signified, the syntax to the semantics as is the case between the letterforms of words to the perceived meanings associated in the mind of the viewer as reader, is an area in which I plan to continue my visual explorations.
The tendency in the technical process of my work has been towards blurring and breaking the traditional rules of typography with respect to proper leading, spacing and so forth, and also to subvert the conventions of habitual reading that the viewer brings to their encounter of the work, so that the viewer is forced to consider whether the piece is to be seen as image, or read as text. In terms of the process of archiving the individual modular sheets, the technique is one of imaging them onto archival quality parchment, followed by subsequent texturing or “aging” of the crumpled sheets, and finally their preservation in paraffin wax as a means of giving the whole work a material presence and form that is enticing to the viewer. It is through this technique that I have sought to introduce into the rigidly ordered system of the written word with its attendant typographic rules of legibility, the notion of randomly layered textual matter that can be either “read as text” or “seen as image” by the viewer… to appropriate text and present it as image.
Thus it is, that these multiple layers of textual matter facilitate an intuitive and serendipitous encounter with the work through which, in addition to the other objectives outlined above, I attempt to engage and challenge the viewer's habitual conventions in the search and retrieval of information and/or meaning. People have an inherent desire to impose order and structure on information, and my work is in part an effort to subvert and frustrate this convention through an absence of such a hierarchy.
Since first investigating the technique of modular archival-sheets in 1999, I have evolved towards an alternate application of this process, in which I have decided to archive my entire personal library of actual books with copious marginal notes and commentary overwritten in the margins. In this new phase, I am working towards appropriating copies of my entire personal library of books, which number in the several hundreds, into a massive archive project entitled Unpublished *… this work will entail my entire collection of obsessive “mad readings” that I have undertaken over a period of fifteen years, as a result of my complete and unrelenting obsession with searching out the meaning of life. It is a quest that has taken me through readings of obscure and occult philosophical books, theological and speculative treatises and manuscripts, as well as a host of contemporary writings on various tangential subjects.
Thus, my visual work as an artist has become a natural and seamless extension of what has become the consuming quest and passion of my adult life… the search for meaning, and how meaning is derived from the apparent chaos and illusion of the world around us — as is paralleled in my archival work wherein the random chaos of the imaged text carries the latent potential for creation of meaning in the readers mind. To this end, I have and will continue to experiment with different combinations and pairings of textual and visual themes which will include that of letterforms and imaged text, obsessive collection and archiving of thought, the preciousness of information and learning, physical preservation of knowledge by means of waxing and containment, and notions of dualism as evidenced through syntax and semantics (meaning generated “at-a-distance” from physical to metaphysical).
As I continue to work as an artist, I plan to explore the use of multi-media in conjunction with my current archival piece, perhaps incorporating sensor-activated sound with layers of narrated text that will mimic the three-dimensional form, the use of sensor-activated lights or perhaps back-lit textual sheets, or even presented as part of a web-installation with multimedia components — all in an on-going attempt to generate a new level of meaning that the viewer informs interactively into the work as they “read” the image. With this as my goal, I hope to develop an integrated and coherent group of related pieces that will interact with each other on both physical and metaphysical levels across the intervening gallery space.
As indicated in the opening paragraph of my statement, my primary objective in the visual investigations I have undertaken thus far, is to produce art that "tells a story” — to become in essence a “visual literary artist” or visual raconteur as it were… The viewer, forced to imbue the work with their own meaning, is finally placed in the capacity of both a transmitter and receiver of meaning at one and the same time. The determination as to whether the Archival project will be “seen as image” or “read as a text”... is ultimately left to the viewer to decide.
Randall Schmidt