Vorbeigeflogen. Byron Clercx from Moscow
Vortrag am Donnerstag, 20. November 2003, um 11:00 Uhr, Raum 101
Byron Clercx lives and works in Moscow, Idaho. U.S.A.; where he operates ClercxWorks, a flegling art and design firm with his wife, Lynn. Byron is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art & Design at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho where he coordinates the sculpture program and teaches a 20th century seminar that explores relationships between art, architecture, design, science, philosphy, music and related fields of inquiry. Mr. Clercx also has teaching experience in painting, drawing, printmaking, bookarts, ceramics, installation and performance art and he works regularly with BFA and MFA cqandidates on their studio work and thesis.
Byron was born on August 21, 1960 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, U.S.A. In 1985 he received his B.S. with an art emphasis from the University of Wisconsin - River Falls; where he met his wife Lynn (McLaughlin, 1988). Byron received his MFA in Sculpture from the University of California - Fullerton, in Fullerton, California in 1991. His father (Merl) was a high school art teacher for thirty five years and continues to paint in his studio in Lowertown Artists District in St. Paul, Minnesota. His youngest brother (Todd) is the art department chairperson and painting instructor at the same high school in Roseville, Minnesota where his fathetr taught. Todd is also is an active and exhibiting painter.
Statement:
I grew up middle class and Midwestern, with artists and arts educators in my family. The appreciation and fabrication of art was an integral part of my formative years. Observing my father, I witnessed him employ art as a vehicle for personal inquiry and expression. In the classroom he parlayed that 'desire to inquire, to his students, again using art to pose problems and solutions. Accordingly, in my studio emphasis is placed on asking questions. Concepts dictate materials and processes, not the other way around, and I find something inherently principled and liberating in this seemingly subtle, albeit postmodern, distinction. Answers, in the form of visual outcomes, while fortuitous, are not the sole purpose of this intellectual enterprise.
Many of my sculptures and installations employ a similar text based locus that loosely addresses the theme: book-as-metaphor. One is a series of book objects that are literally carved into symbolic shapes from glued together book pages. What appears to be wood grain are actually individual pages that have been sliced through revealing where the printers ink stained the white paper. This physical cutting and pasting technique is similar to the act of reading and/or writing, where the narrative is constructed one page at a time. Pragmatically and philosophically, all of these book alterations are intended as gestures of renewal and reconsideration: as a form of benevolent recycling that extends known, and stimulates new, narratives. Other mixed media bookish experiments explore the intimacy shared between the corporeal and conceptual aspects of books and our bodies.
Recent two-dimensional works include smaller collages made from laminated book pages that are glued to a plywood ground. The layers of this text-matrix are distressed until the surface is unreadable in a lteral manner. Occasionally, other materials like paint and tape are introduced as compositional ploys or to obscure the original narrative. A diptych format that combines altered-text panels with painted panels emerged. The formal composition is, perhaps, suggestive of book layout (recto/verso) and/or dualities present in life memory vs. experiental, conscious/unconscious, active/passive, and life/death. This two-panel strategy is continued in a new larger scale series of paintings (not in this exhibition) inspired by my previous text based works. These larger diptychs refer to, but do not reside on, actual book pages. The additive and subtractive process of building up and then carving through acrylic house paint on plywood panels, layer by layer, is a reductive or deconstructive theme that runs through most of my work.