ARTIST STATEMENT

My interest in visual narrative grows out of a fascination with the ‘stories,’ both intentional and unintentional, conscious and unconscious, embodied in family snapshots and photo albums. My early works were often parodies of snapshots and used people and animals as primary subjects. By the late ‘70s however, I had become interested in making work that would be somewhat independent of a ‘central character’—the unifying device so common to most narratives across all strata of our culture. I began to work toward creating a visual meta-language capable of conceptualizing and articulating the slippery interface between our concepts of object and image. By the early ‘80s, I was using copy machines and collage techniques to fabricate my work. As the pieces grew in scale and complexity, I began utilizing a type of ‘field’ composition in which many individual elements were deployed over a relatively large area made up of several individual frames. The implied connections between elements created a flow that I conceived of as narrative, even though very abstract. I was finding parallels for these ideas in works of contemporary poetry, experimental fiction and cinema.

 Most of the objects represented in those pictures were common—toys, tools, hardware, household objects, etc. That fact, in combination with the ‘photographic’ rendering of the copy machine, gave the works a degree of familiarity and realism. That realistic dimension was countered by an underlying emphasis on conceptualization, conveyed primarily by arrangements of elements that might suggest, for example, an exploded-view diagram, a hieroglyphic inscription, or a mathematical formula. The driving force behind these combinations was often a series of implied ‘translations’ of images into objects (or objects into other objects). For example, in Mag/Lab/Mow (1987) a photograph of the feet of a statue taking a step is ‘translated’ into a cluster of elements that include metal objects descending a stair-like structure, mazes, enlarged fragments of footprints and a bicycle pedal. In another piece, Three/Wave/Gaze, (1987), two photographs of a hand reaching into a pool of water are translated into a cluster of objects that include a hand clamp, a bundle of wires, a piece of wood with wave-like grain and an enlarged fragment of a fingerprint. Those objects in turn underwent further transformations. I conceived of that process as analogous to ‘chains of thought’ where simple objects or images are mentally projected into increasingly complex states, in which ‘the everyday’ can embody a personal cosmology.

 My more recent work is made of individually framed sections, now of widely varying size. Some of these pieces are large, over 25 feet in length. Increasingly, relationships occur across the gap between frames rather than within them. Representational elements are more dramatically combined with abstract or non-representational elements. I continue to think of this work as an exploration of the dynamic between object and image, essentially the space of narrative, although currently the term ‘micro-narrative’ might be more appropriate. I believe that the relatively minimal quality of the current later pieces helps the work to exist on the fine line between ‘pure’ perception and formulated thought, between the implication of meaning and the seductive attraction of non-meaning.

 
Carl Toth
2005