Michael Weiss
August 28 - September 30, 2006

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

All art-making is a process of abstraction and distillation. The choice to delve thoroughly into the visual language of abstraction is one of conscious certainty. The nature of non-objective imagery is to be oblique in content and to begin with questions, whereas the use of symbolic/pictorial imagery delivers an implied didacticism. Though this latter sort of work may, in fact be open-ended in meaning, it begins with a narrative code that conveys particulars of information in a more explicit fashion. This specificity is what precipitates the inherent presence of didacticism and its related tendency toward the creation of work that begins with a statement. Hence, it also implies a structural power relationship that posits the artist as teacher or enlightener and the viewer as the recipient of the wisdom of the creator. The use of an abstract pictorial language is a formal construct that in some ways attempts to negate this uneven relationship by placing the artist and viewer side by side and the art-object into the role of other.