Failures
"Failures" presents an obsessive pursuit for perfection and the inability to ultimately reach it. The work uses the form of the grid and the process of its creation as a basic structure representing an ideal of order, coherence, and objectivity. Each piece is constructed with the same set of mathematical guidelines and consequently has a similar appearance: square works of varying sizes displaying objects arranged on a neutral black or white background. The means of creating each grid is both formulaic and self-referential allowing chance to determine the overall size, order, and therefore, the look of the piece. The work sets up the expectation of a perfect order achieved through a faultless objectivity and alludes to an ultimate ideal, yet it never fully succeeds. In fact, upon close inspection, the grids I create are not perfect – due to the rules of my system, the final row is always truncated.
Like this work, Utopian quests for complete objectivity, perfect order, and true meaning in language are all, in the end, unattainable. Yet, humanity continues to need (and to strive for) them. We are caught in a schizophrenic cycle of needing what will always fail. This is a paradox. The grid is able to embody it, to contain contradiction within its perfectly ordered coordinate points and exactitude. But beyond the perfect beauty of the grid, failure becomes the subject of the work in that the obsessive order becomes redundant and the objectivity, the reference and therefore language itself, all fail.