| The way objects and images are perceived upon a first viewing is far different than the way they appear after extended periods of viewing. Eventually, the things we see repeatedly begin to loose their initial meaning, and what we are left with is a kind of raw information. Numbness to the original function sets in and allows for a reinvention to take place. By allowing this numbness to take over, we are able to see a glimpse of the fantastic potential that has been lying there, inert, all along. |  |
Bjorn Copeland
The way objects and images are perceived upon a first viewing is far different than the way they appear after extended periods of viewing. Eventually, the things we see repeatedly begin to loose their initial meaning, and what we are left with is a kind of raw information. Numbness to the original function sets in and allows for a reinvention to take place. By allowing this numbness to take over, we are able to see a glimpse of the fantastic potential that has been lying there, inert, all along.
For the last five or six years, I’ve tried to make sculptures and drawings that highlight this potential, and have employed this idea as their start point. Initially, I was working almost entirely with old magazines and books that I had amassed growing up. Cutting and pasting images became a constant practice. For me though, this collage aesthetic is more so in line with music and album/flier art, than, say, with the art you might find in museums and galleries.
In 1997, along with some school friends and my brother, we started a band called Black Dice. At the time, the band was a diversion from art studies, but it eventually became the main focus of our attention. Ironically, upon graduating, Black Dice served as the only real pressing reason to continue making visual art. There always seemed to be a record cover to make, or a flier to design. We started using a lot of collaged imagery to try and help contextualize the band. Black Dice has been a huge influence on my independent art making practices. The way that we make music, by misappropriating sounds, misusing instruments and playing with proportions, is essentially how I work in the studio. I began expanding upon the crude system of symbols that I kept in order to notate the songs we were writing. These eventually developed into rather large-scale drawings (constructed of gel ink, cut paper, spray paint and collage elements). These drawings have evolved into fantastical diagrams that seek to explain the changes we experience on a daily basis—through sound, light and tactile means. They are extreme abstract magnifications that function much like the illustrations and animations we see accompanying health care products and cleaning aids on television and in magazines. Things like odor fighters, scrubbing bubbles, pore cleansers and PH balance are explained to would-be customers through entirely fictitious renderings that show a process taking place in the most basic of ways. I try to apply this same license to my drawings. I consider them to be “static animations.”
This idea of “static animation” has crossed over to object assemblages that are either constructed from a series of existing objects whose relationship has been altered to suggest or serve a new function, or found objects that are treated in a way as to imply some sort of evolution. Color and pattern work are usually involved in an attempt to break down organic change into some sort of visible, decorative logic.
At this point, ideas in my studio have resurfaced not only on our record sleeves, but also in the musical ideas from which songs are constructed. At times, there is very little separation between my studio practice and Black Dice. The two have fed each other for ten years now.
