Installation view, Fog, 20042 rollei medium format projectors, medium format slides
Courtesy Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver
So I was reading Raymond Williams' Keynotes the other day; yesterday, in fact. He is exploring everyone's ideas about a word, although he is aware of his own biases. He is defining the variations of complicated words and at the same time saying they are impossible to pin down.
And I was also reading another excerpt, this time from one of my coursepacks, about how language carries different meanings. There is the intended meaning of the artist, and the symbolic meaning (for example, the symbolism inherent in the Christian cross).
This applies to Kevin Schmidt's work because his fog and forest things were vastly different in the interpretation I got from seeing them and what he had to say about them.
I thought it was more about the desire for magical experience, the desire for phenomena to take us out of ourselves.
He said that by putting this art piece in a darkened room it made the viewer very aware of themselves in the gallery space, instead of dissociating themselves from it the way they would if it was a paper-photograph on a white wall.
Make sense? Both views are about the viewer, about the presence of the viewer's body in relation to the artwork, but they're both a little different. It's neat to be able to draw my own conclusions about a work and then hear the artists' opinion. (I'm sure my paraphrase isn't entirely accurate, but que sera sera.)
