PHILLIP POTTER
My work is based in a process-theory bound mode of understanding, witnessing the juxtaposition of time as a duality. In my process, I witness time as a conventional idea based on precognition. The past is non-existent. The past does not exist and likewise the present does not exist because as soon as you experience it, it is then gone. The present isn’t always slipping away, its infinite minuteness can’t ever actually be observed. While it appears that I am making decisions as I put marks onto the canvas, I am instead precognizing each process, the mark only now existing as part of the perpetual re-examination of the juxtaposition of time. I use my cognition to think or see into the future in order to make choices in the now. That present moment is then gone and becomes an abstract idea of what has happened. When working in a non-representational mode as opposed to objective work, the final outcome is not conclusively projected, instead each moment of the process is precognized, moment to moment. Using the precognition of each future moment, I am able to reference the abstract idea of past decisions that have been made. Using each present moment to enact that precognitional experience, I chose to be aware of the vacuum that perception creates. In this way, the outcome of the work is both preplanned and not planned at all. It is both an active response and a concrete formation of choices that respond to both past and future directions in the infinitely minute present moment. The past and the future only exist within cognition. To the viewer the work provides a positive, negative or neutral experience based on the predominant cultural institutional aesthetic. It’s truly inconsequential whether something has some intrinsic value. I’m playing on my own institutional aesthetics when I make, that are based in the abstraction of past. An experience of an object is based on the recontextualizing of past experiences and future potential. www.phillippotter.com |