Downstairs

3 March – 13 March

CARBON DATE - Ken Sandӧ

 

Ken Sandӧ - Exhibition Statement

The artworks in the exhibition Carbon Date are a continuation of a project that I have been working through for the last twenty years.  They are part of my art lexicon that is evolving and deepening through this drawn out exploratory process.

Each individual piece of work is imbued with traces of the overarching concepts that drive my art making, all a small part, yet essential elements of the ‘grand narrative’.

Driven by an ongoing fascination with the construction and polemics of  figurative and representational art and the perceptions of both the artist and viewer to the made image; this is how I would describe the main motivation behind my art making. 

Looking for, and at, what is considered normal or everyday, then questioning why it is, prompts my desire for creatively trying to demystify the normative. Through this process of conceptualisation I usually try to twist the accepted forms of normative constructs by introducing through my imagery fanciful paradoxical fabrications. 

Those never-ending questions I have about imagery and perceptions of reality; Liminal identity and constructed identity. Questions of gender and sexualities. What defines normative and what doesn’t. The space between, around, beyond, aside, from the conventional Life… This is what prompts me. 

It is noticeable that the works in the exhibition are simply shades of black/grey on a neutral ground (Acrylic paint with charcoal or Indian Ink with charcoal). This is a deliberate device I use to imply/indicate that between two states of a perceived duality there lies variety and difference, hinting at inclusion or subversion. 

It also plays with the concepts of photography and captured reality and the falsehood of actuality and fact that becomes embedded in the process through our usually unconscious acceptance of the image as a portal into the world.  

This is a little less obvious in my process of making the imagery, yet still there, in the use of computer technology (the Now) to construct the imagery initially as a composite from found images, sketched out in paint or ink on board, then finally drawn out in charcoal (the Primitive)... 

The thematics are reiterated in the distorted representational content of the works and play against the conventional figurative art that is often prevalent in conservative main-street galleries. 

Ideally the viewer gets an awareness of the image from approximately 3 meters away where the apparent realism of the piece catches the eye and thus captivates enough to make the viewer come closer. 

The closer a person gets to the image the more it distorts and devolves into the component parts of soot and paint. An affront to the ‘window in the wall’ that most realism attempts.