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ARTIST STATEMENTS

BirdMonkey-Puffer-2018.jpg

ONE
In Art we're drawn more to the Expressionist than the Cerebral; more to the Figurative than the Abstract. The Concept is important to us: it's the question asked, a framework for the story told, but we've always found deeper meaning in the Emotional and the Subconscious than in the Rational and the Quantifiable. Almost five decades ago, Sol LeWitt wrote that, “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art” ('Paragraphs on Conceptual Art', Artforum, June 1967). This is not what we say. We say: Art is a Ghost we Dreamed into Existence.

 

 

TWO
We see ourselves as polymathic. Through our collaboration, we're striving towards a Total Art made up of multiple forms: the cinematic, the musical, the sculptural, the literary, the photographic and the immersive. We are one woman and one man, existing in Time and Place, our sensors set to record. We want to record this World from every angle, but a World can never be known objectively. It can only be remembered, dreamed, imagined, fantasised, glimpsed in the shadows, reflected and distorted in the swirl of a pool. Our work is predominantly autobiographical: memories, dreams, imaginings, fantasies and glimpses are hoarded in dusty display cases for examination under the lens. The points on which we pin these specimens are metaphorical not mathematical: we are Symbolists not Documentarians. We want a Total Art through which we can piece together all those gathered fragments and parts into meaningful representations of the World as seen in the splinters and shards of a smashed mirror.

 

 

THREE

Art retains traces of an earlier Magic. Our ancestors – the first artists, musicians, dancers, storytellers – wanted to know the unknowable; to control the uncontrollable; to capture nature's magic and channel it for the good of the tribe. If you take on the likeness of the bull and we all dance around the communal blaze, impassioned by the rhythms of our chanting, then you become the bull. If I paint the bull's likeness in spatters of mud on the walls of the cave and it is reanimated in the flicker of the flames, then I will harness the rage of the bull. We want our Art to channel nature's magic. We want to free that terrible and beautiful creature-image, with its snorting snout and Guernica-head from the shadows of the Labyrinth at Knossos, let it loose upon Life. We would do this for the good of the tribe.

Originally published in Film Panic, issue 5, Jan 2018
 

 

CV and SCREENINGS

READ AVANT KINEMA'S OOBROY: SMASHED GLASS MANIFESTOS

ON EXPLODING APPENDIX (REVOLUTION*ART*MANIFESTO)

oobROY-01-Cover.tiff
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