ARTIST STATEMENT

CIRCULAR

Experience is round. As human animals, in a world we can touch  and smell, we see in a round way. We can turn ourselves/bodies around in a circle to see all of it around us. We can tilt our heads back and see the round dome of the sky above us. Our sense of place is hearing sounds near and far, seeing objects and other animals close to us and far away, moving and still, feeling air move against our backs or faces, touching warm, cold, hard, soft; smooth, bumpy, against hands, feet, arms, legs, buttocks, shoulders, breasts, faces. It is smelling the earth or pavement that we feel under our feet.  

 Experience is round, a swirling mixture of the past into the present and back again, all of our perceptions of any given thing at any point in our lives mixed in with every other perception of that thing, taking on more richness and complexity the older we get. Experience transforms us from the person we are to one of the ones we were, perhaps to someone we will be, all within the cycle of a lifetime. 

 On the train between Temagami and North Bay, a few years ago now, this idea began to gel. The increase in the beaver population was obvious. There were beaver lodges on every little pond and stream, and I was struck by the roundness of everything.

Whenever a man-made object came into view, it was some kind of box. Looking from the train into the world outside, the straight, clean, shining edges of the window framed the view. Outside this moving metal tube, four seats and an aisle wide, was an alien world. Rushing water and broken rocks, windblown and ragged trees, birds’ nests, beaver lodges, dams made of sticks and mud, bogs full of berries and flowers and insect-eating plants.  

 A circular image sits somewhere between primary and secondary experience.  

 Human beings’ secondary experience of the world is through the window of culture. Our window is straight-sided and flat, or sequential and linear. Straight-sided things divide us from the round world, protect us from weather and extremes of temperature, give us reliable, uniform surfaces to lean against and walk on. The conventions of picture-making are flat, and have corners. The ways in which we transmit images to each other, in photographic, cinematic and electronic media, all present the world in a straight-sided frame, with ninety degree corners. Our primary experience is edited and transformed by this frame. 

 Secondary/edited versions of reality allow for interpretation, the imposition of meanings that can be conveyed to other people, who recognize the symbols of this representation. This is what art is, whether static or time-based - a set of conventions for representing the world, whether literally or as parallel, “abstract” experience. 

Experience is round, a swirling mixture of the past into the present and back again, all of our perceptions of any given thing at any point in the life of our society mixed in with every other perception of that thing, taking on more richness and complexity the older we get. Experience transforms us from the society we are to one of the ones we were, perhaps to one we will be, all within the cycle of a culture’s lifetime. 

 So, art comments upon and re-interprets art.  

 In the “Modern” period, western cultures believed that they had finally emerged from the dark ages of human evolution into a new, bright world, made possible by scientific knowledge, feeding the creation of new technologies. The “Postmodern Age” is the shock of cold water, the recognition that the new, bright world of our own creation is still completely dependent on that other, round world of primary experience, and that the new world threatens the very existence of both the old world and ourselves. 

 We are part of the old, round world, even inside our straight-sided shelters, even though we have come to understand the world almost exclusively through secondary, straight-sided interpretations, made by other humans like ourselves. The “Postmodern” era is the new Age of Enlightenment, the era of recognition that no man-made creation can last forever, that the forces of erosion and corrosion, of corruption, evasion and conversion that have changed the face of our planet since its very birth, cannot be contained or avoided or neutralized. We are it and it is us. To live well on it, we have to recognize our limitations, and accept that we must live within them. 

 That said, I believe in human beings. Their foolish self-aggrandisement is, at the same time, the force and beauty of their creativity. It is said that, “those who do not know their history are condemned to re-live it.” Even with all the history that our advanced civilization has accumulated to instruct us, we will deliberately forget it in order to be able to re-interpret the world in our own image, the image of the present. Memory brings the experience of the past into the experience of the present. All experience is round. History repeats itself. The seasons come and go, and come again. All life is a circle, from birth through

maturity to death and rebirth. The present time and the past exist simultaneously.  

 The circle is a symbol of this simultaneity of time in many human cultures. Cyclical time and simultaneous time are the same in the symbol of the circle. It is an interpretation of primary experience, both physical and abstract. It is a human artifact, a flat object. As a surface for an image, it contrasts with and therefore comments on other objects, other surfaces for images, which are straight-sided, with corners. In the postmodern age, to make an image that is an illusion of three-dimensional space, of primary experience, of round space, re-interprets history in the light of the present day. Memory brings the experience of the past into the experience of the present.  

 This is not dogma. Dogma is a fortress against change, against the necessity of life to re-interpret the world on its own terms. I believe in the power of human beings to learn and to survive, to re-create, re-configure, change course, re-interpret, re-trace their steps, re-discover, see everything afresh. My paintings are the product of all of this, of Renaissance perspective, Romantic realism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstraction, photography, virtual reality. They are post-Modern. They are about the simultaneity of the past and the present. They are both interpretations of primary experience and comments on the history of western art. They are meant to be lived with, as the discussion of how we humans live in the world belongs in our everyday experience, not separated from it in museums. So their scale is human, domestic, not monumental. They are physical objects, with weight and depth. The process of creating them is visible and tangible on their surfaces. The present time and memory exist simultaneously in every dimension of these paintings. I would like them to create pleasure in the people who look at them, the pleasure of recognizing something truthful/affirmative and good about our being on this Earth.

Judy Gouin

August 2009