NAME: (wrenn, c) scrapworm
BIRTH PLACE:
BIOGRAPHY
I began to notice problems within the existing infra and super-structures as I individuated my worldview and experienced the cyclical shatter of various acculturated assumption sets. With the pseudonym, scrapworm- I named the transformative allegory on which I base my ever-expanding open system of accumulated observation. This identity is but a human perspective on presenting ideas and allows me to figuratively identify with collective entanglement. We are all really scrapworms, winding paths through the life fueling collective composts of time, thought, matter, space, society, culture -- and the web-expanding metaphorical implications of such concepts.
I encountered Chashama via the Tixe gallery while working at 4 Times Sq. for The New Yorker. It was but a dirty storefront in June of 2003, the 2-story leftover an office building (formerly18-floor) with the defunct ground floor novelty store, 'fun city'. Waiting to be demolished for One Bryant Park, Chashama made this (and other subsequent) 'real estate in transition' available for use by artists. As the stores' leases expired, Chashama managed street-level theaters, art spaces, and project areas along 42nd St. (6th/Bway). I saw a small call to artists posted in the raw space window of what Janusz Jaworski turned into Tixe. First selected for a group show, I then applied to create the two-month installation, 'Visions of Excess: Visions of Void'. Building 'Visions' was a pivotal experience of dreaming and going for it full force within a meaningfully transient site. Chashama later offered me a window opportunity along the exit elevators of the AMC Empire movie theater within the 'New 42nd St.' megalomania. A disused Carvel in a mezzanine former food court (now Dave & Busters), 'on the way' evolved into a topography inhabited by small clay and plaster characters in vignette architectures along a meticulously placed industrial and organic, digitally infiltrated, diorama landscape. I printed related image/textual bookmarks with the stipend, distributing 5,000 from the site over the three-month course of the show.
I live and make things as I know how, trusting my thoughts and the metaphoric circumstances I encounter in my experience of the world as inspiring material to explore. With the 'scraps' I collect, I create abstract narrative contexts that respond to my deepest questions. Merging multiple mediums and manipulations, I examine associative ideas and assimilative 'memory' (within affecting influential structures). In artist residencies, I experimented with photocopies on surfaces using a wet tearing process that tested the paper falling apart before adhering. This practice focused a tediously meditative technique that led to the continental billboard, 'Land of Make Believe' (shown in self-managed a Chashama storefront at 208 W37th St., Feb. 2006). In combining images for visual effect and scale tracking/mapping, I imagine a world of anachronistic decay, a wasteland of the 'American Dream' that foreshadows itself by investigating subtle determinants. I had been working with 1948-1955 Life magazines in 2005, as the post-war period seemed insightful to contemporary conditions. I study/use published images and words to enhance my understanding of influences on 20th Century opinions of progress, efficiency, survival, and authoritarian 'fear/faith' dynamics from a human psychological perspective within the influences of apocalypse culture.
I build mental models for myself, as the networking of conceptual representations allows me an engaging awareness of dynamics between subjects. My art creation thus attempts to create a spatial set of conditions; suggestions that will let the viewer make individualized perceptive conclusions within the immersive scenario. As representations of matter presented through manufacture and belief-system lenses, my work requires the individual to complete the suspended idea inter-relationships alluded to by organizational patterns, linguistic clues, and subtle visual references.
While I find 'the world' tragic in innumerable ways, I'm primarily bothered by the layers of intellectualized separation that let us accept photographic images of death and violent suffering as but the sad way of the world. Yet, images of deep space remain unfathomable remote truths! I challenge myself in a daily life of nurturing ideas and creating sculptural ways to express insights of interconnected dynamics within three-dimensional space, over time. I do so within the deep time evolution of human potential and an ominous apocalyptic atmosphere. 'Apocalypse' is but a collective idea grown from the fear of losing self and power. I make art situations that creatively manifest such potentially true visions, offering artifact maps toward potential transformations instead.
What is the role of artists within our apocalyse culture- they vary infinite, all vital.
