Jim Cogswell

Statement:

Jim Cogswell was born and raised in Japan as the child of missionary parents. After studying English Literature in college, with a Minor in Religion and Philosophy, he returned to Japan, at which time he first became seriously involved in the daily practice of painting. His paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures have subsequently been exhibited nationally and internationally. He has also created several interdisciplinary performance works in collaboration with dancers, composers, scientists, poets, and other visual artists.

For the last seven years, while engaged in other projects, Cogswell has been making and remaking an anthropomorphic alphabet in various media. The project began with a series of photographs, and has led over time to numerous sets of drawings, a folio of dry point prints, a number of oil paintings and encaustics, a series of low relief glazed ceramic wall pieces, digital prints, and mixed media panels incorporating photographic processes. In nearly every phase of work on this project he has developed a complete alphabetic set, twenty-six images speaking in one language of form

"With each set of alphabetic images I feel the world unfold before me. The set of images has become for me a cosmic chart, an encyclopedic summation of human knowledge and experience, a periodic table of all the possible names for the seen and the unseen, which, in the act of making, I sympathetically incorporate into my own being. It is a grand narrative, unfolding from A to Z, formed of twenty-six sub plots with a cast of the same four characters. Each set of images is a poem of twenty-six stanzas, translated into one language after another, each language touching only a limited range of the infinite substances and their shadows.

Deep into this project, I finally realized that the representation of isolated phonetic signs was far less compelling for me than improvisation on the structures that the signs provide. The fixed sequence and familiar shapes of the letters, spare and fundamentally immutable, possess a remarkable tolerance for variation. I became engaged as a visual artist in testing the limits of that variability. I also saw that the familiarity of phonetic signs rendered them transparent; their marvelous visual dynamics are, under ordinary circumstances, invisible to us. By putting them into the context of this series, I strip these signs of their ordinary function and reveal the hidden pleasures of their form.

As my work has became structurally more experimental, I have grown less concerned with overt references to phonetic signs or to the human figure. I am more interested now in the problem of establishing a controlled visual language through variations on a limited vocabulary of forms within a finite set of visual images. I am curious as to how meanings are generated using patterns and variations that emerge within a fixed set of forms minimally distinguished from each other, which is of course the essential elegance of an alphabet.”