GERALD CANNON - ARTIST STATEMENT

CV

I have, in recent years, become most concerned with methods of communication in all forms.  Essentially, how codes are constructed and manifest in all forms.  Certainly the digital, but more importantly, from the point of view of this new medium, how all codes can be reexamined.

Confusion reigns in most code interpretation.  Even digital exposes questions of how it might be no more clearly discrete than analog systems.  If sampling systems of all sorts (each digital in structure) are prone to “sampling” errors, then our perception of motion, sound, color, even reality itself comes into question.  Codes are little more than algorithms in any form and, hence, like art itself, mimic reality and feign truth.

Now these codes can be digitally woven into meta-codes where sound creates image and words create motion, etc.  This almost magical misdirection of intent leads to questions about how we perceive along with what we perceive.  My work weaves this misdirection into work that often reveals its own flaws and the flaws of the codes connecting it to other systems.  It can lead to two simultaneous though mutually exclusive conclusions, even of its viability as art or communication.

My work premise has been that any thoroughly developed, internally consistent system, followed intently, will lead to a form that is beautiful, valid expression.  In other words, art.  What we have regularly accepted as truth and/or reality often has meager sway on the truth and reality of this outcome. - Gerald Cannon, 2008

Additional thoughts:

Grass in Early Snow:

Each "grass" image was created w/ code I wrote in a programming language called Context Free Design Grammar.  The central image (not in exhibition), "Four Hundred Sixty Six Million Three Hundred Thirteen Thousand Eight Hundred Seventeen Shapes" took several hours to generate at approximately 8 x 8 ft. and is made up of 466,313,817 vector rectangles.  Rasterized in PhotoShop, it is printed in archival paper at 8.5 x 11 in.

Additionally, 100 separate "grass" images were generated based on the same code.  Each varies somewhat randomly, and these are printed with archival pigmented ink on archival paper at 8.5 x 11 in.  There is nothing other than groups of small rectangles created by a mathematical formula included in all images.

 

Word Works:

These five images are each 15 x 60 in.  Implied narrative via the format, they are digitally constructed by mixing several verbal, gestural and pictorial communication coding systems.  From sign language to semaphore to written English, these mixed image/texts lead to more confusion than communication.  All are digital C-prints.

 

Flowers:

My own digital photographs of Azalea bushes are reduced to approximately 1-in. grid systems.   They are not pixilated, rather purposely reduced into abstraction in a formal system.  The 3-dimensional pedestals and artificial fabric flowers play against the 2-dimensional "photographic" representations of flowers.  Questions arise as to the degree of "illegitimacy" of one "art" form over another.  Obviously, regardless of the value we assign to each form of abstraction, there are no flowers present.