SIMONDOTCALM
PEEPHOLE
We are, each of us, experiencing the world through our own private peephole - a narrow slice of the human experience that can not possibly give us a broad enough view to draw any conclusions about the world we live in. The best we can do is try to broaden this slim window, to open ourselves up to other perspectives, other ways of thinking, other peepholes.
With that in mind, Peephole is an attempt to make something that could not be experienced from a single perspective. Measuring 32 feet long the scale ensures that there is no right position to view it from. Step back to see the big picture and you lose the details. Move in to see the details and you miss the big picture. Your view is always incomplete. You’re forced to go on a journey; to move around it; to experience it from different angles.
The specific imagery I have created for this piece, and they’re juxtapositions, are meant as a visual expression of absurdist philosophy. Which is to say, that I believe that life is irrational, “a tale told by and idiot, full of sound and furry, signifying nothing.” Peephole is an attempt to challenge our human instinct to search for meaning. If you try to decipher what the octopus, the fire hydrant and the body builder mean, you will invariably be wrong. They mean nothing. I know this because I put them there. This is why I tend to think of myself as an abstract artist who works with recognizable shapes. I make choices based solely on how things look and feel next to each other. The images I use are like the various instruments in a piece of classical music. We don’t ask what the flute or the cello mean in a symphony; we simply experience how their notes feel in the composition. The truth of a thing, as Stanley Kubrick once said, “is in the feel of it, not the think of it.”
With that in mind, I want to invite the viewer to get lost with me - in a mood, a feeling, the pure experience of our shared humanity, without the desperate folly of insisting that it makes sense to our narrow limits of our minds - our peepholes.
Although my work is a collage I do not work in found materials. My work is comprised, with few exceptions, of my own photos and drawings. There are no accidental moments. There is not a drip or scribble that is not carefully thought out and and placed. I aim for precision even in chaos.
The numbers one through nine that span the length of the piece (in subtle and not so subtle ways) reflect the forward progress of life itself. Every moment stemming from the moment before and leading onward to the next. What looks like chaos from up close can be understood as a single moment in one cohesive story. Notice that the red section at the far left of the piece connects perfectly with the red section at the far right of the piece, which makes the entire work a continuous loop. So there is no real beginning. There is just a place we start.