Michael Rodemer

Statement:


Artmaking is my way of thinking about things, and of sharing those thoughts with others.

It has been my lot to have acquired a certain facility with some physical media, with some electronic media, and with some literary media. Not surprisingly, these all turn out to be good for different expressive purposes, so that when particular thoughts demand this or that medium, or combination of media, for working through them, I’m eager to take on the challenge.

In retrospect, I can see that my thinking has been fed by three inexhaustible sources of wonder: Nature, consciousness, and social existence.

Nature is the wellspring of artmaking: nakedly simple, endlessly complex, intertwined, beautiful, terrifying, familiar and strange, the phenomena of Nature demand one’s attention, command humility and wonder. Life itself, and death, birth, change, decay and rejuvenation, orbit Nature’s impenetrable nucleus. A number of my artworks, from the Arboreal Line neon series to the telepresence work and the vibration experiments, attempt to share reflections upon Nature and to direct others’ attention to it.

Consciousness enables one to puzzle over Nature – and oneself – and is itself one of the greatest puzzles. Many of my works aim to provoke or direct the awareness of the participant/viewer, to engender consciousness of what is often taken as a given: from the Sitting/Sitzen piece to The View from Here, consciousness is the topic and the process at the heart of the artwork.

The extension of consciousness to include other humans — their constructs, their doings, their mis-doings — necessitates the third arena of engagement, the social. Conceptions of morality, and justice, the engines of love and hatred and anger, prognostications of hell on earth and the evergreen utopian impulse, all arise out of the social dimension. These works are my most literary, since words and dramatic structures work so well to articulate nuances of conflict, longing, fear, and hope. The texts of many of the interactive sculptures express this social concern, as does the opera, vidGod.

I look forward to continuing to share my work in these large subject areas, and especially to integrating thoughts, feelings, media, and forms into more complex expressions, into synthetic wholes that more accurately tell a version of the truth.