Synthetic Impressions

          The impulse to leave one’s mark, a message to some unknown future audience, is especially strong in adolescence and is especially expressed through the medium of graffiti.  Youth marks its presence, authority attempts to erase what it understands as an anti-social act.   Eventually, a richly layered conversation emerges between generations, one ignoring the autonomy and agency of the other.  Synthetic Impressions is an attempt to fabricate a moment in this conversation, to capture an imagined history through an act of forgery; a sort of counterfeit sleight-of-hand that asks the audience to suspend its disbelief for a moment and think about the spaces, largely ignored and unnoticed, where this exchange takes place. 

 

          In this exhibition, I have attempted to create a theatrical “set” where one can contemplate the physicality of this layered conversation between opposing actions. I am hoping that it exists in a state suspension or stasis, as a fragment of memory, or as a partially reconstructed effort at recall, where the parts don’t exactly add up and one is left wondering what this dispute is all about and who, exactly, is right.