Description

Employing the syntax of minimalism and the grammar of conceptual art, my work explores the dichotomy between a theoretical position viewing practice as, in essence, a process of ego-centric affirmation through communication and a theological position, informed by metaphysical nihilism, that emancipation can only be experienced outside of languages’ binary-structures. This raises a central ethical paradox existing as the fulcrum of my practice: communication without a communicated - it being inevitable that in communication a something will be, or will be perceived to be, communicated and that this something cannot avoid enmeshment within a network of linguistic systemization; a process antipathetic to that of authentic liberation. I aim to negotiate this paradox and open up a space beyond the network of binary-oppositions by exploring the (im)possibilities of a purely phatic mode of communication, privileging absence over presence as a strategy of destabilization. Often employing language itself as a pharmacia, I embrace the aesthetic issues that arise in even the most dematerialized of praxis by exploiting the ephemera of the everyday – i.e our everyday existence within advanced capitalist society. By creating explicitly open-work the production of a horizontal and anti-authoritarian arena of engagement is facilitated.

http://danwestlake.net/