GIVAN LÖTZ, 2018
givanlotz.com
MEMORY EXPOSURE — Landscape as Mindstate
We can know more than we can tell. ~ Michael Polanyi
My current artistic interests reference places of emotional resonance; I am searching for enchantment in natural terrain. I am drawn to organic forms and their innate cycles of growth and decay. The ways in which paint naturally mimics these fractal processes is of particular importance to me. The month long May residency was the perfect time to feel a New York spring rise from the end of molting winter. I came to Residency 108 with the express purpose of reading and listening to the landscape to make paintings and mono-print drawings informed by the charged natural surrounds, continuing a refinement of a visual shorthand that echoes my internal logic. This process relies on a reverence for tacit knowledge, a tactile intuition, learning through obsessive making before thinking.
Furthermore, this approach abandons the idea of a supposedly realist picturesque depiction of the world, celebrating instead the indeterminate nature of a place filtered by the imperfect mind. The forceps of our perception crushes what it sees—to observe is to destroy—final presence vanquishes legibility. The unbound world is fluid and dangerous. I want to feel a place where nothing is known because nothing is shaped in advance by words. Where there are no things there is only a stream of manifold, nameless sensations shifting in fullness. Memory Exposure is then not the precise documentation of a place but the absences of debris left over, an uncertain question, a pause, the mere impression grazed by the mind in that space, a rupture between word and thing.
