BFA Thesis Exhibit

Tim Sears

Artist Statement

My work rejects the concept of an singular art object in favor exploring the relationship between artworks, images, and objects. I am interested in investigating the specific ways that these things can communicate through their materiality and relationship to the viewer. This interest has led me to investigate painting and photography, as I feel those two mediums have the most to offer to this type of conceptual investigation. I use techniques of series, collage, and the installation to develop complicated situations, which do not offer one concrete interpretation or idea but an constantly changing one, that develops as each new piece, object, or item is understood alongside the others. My work may be therefore as much an product of curation than as an product of creation.  

In my paintings I deal with repetition through the series, I incorporate motifs of drawing. Many of my paintings are directly dealing with the materiality through color and light, and deal with drawing through brushstroke and space. I attempt to address the formal questions that have existed through painting’s history through both abstract and representational modes. My paintings reference and speak to each other through repeated motifs and ideas, of line, of color, of scale. A hand in one painting points to another, a leaf points to a tree. The green sculpture pairs to the red one, one illuminated figure seems to share the space of another.  

In my photographs I deal with the indexical quality of the photograph, in other words, the ability for an photograph to stand in for an real object, as while as the idea of photo as an document. In my photographic practice I create series of work, or indexes of work, that attempt to document an idea, or express a specific idea or communicate through the entire series. A series of photographs of an person, covered in an cardboard box which is painted over with spray paint, each image creating an record of this process, acting as an artifact of one point in time, that only develops meaning as it shows the entire process, as the body, or the box, becomes increasingly enveloped, or developed throughout the process. A common motif is interruption, or alteration. The face is interrupted by the forest, crudely photoshopped into it. The ceramic is overlaid by the sticker. The hand is covered by the bag. In this sense I am questioning the structure of the photograph, and finding ways to use this structure to talk about itself.  

My work to me is still very much in progress, it continues to develop as I add more images, more ideas, more objects, each adding to the last one and forming a more complete body, a more complete idea, but never finished, never completed.