The installation “Dialectal Flux” is based, as much of my work is, on communication.

Communication may utilize verbal and non-verbal forms, and in general, is the means to provide knowledge to someone. It is, at its core, a delivery mechanism.  It often seems that our ability to understand simple language-based communication is somewhat suspect, but no more so than our relative inability to understand the communication that life itself sends our way on a constant basis. Dialogue of any kind can become tangled and muddled if we allow it to become so, even as we communicate feverishly in trying to prevent it.   This installation is directly informed by this dynamic.

 

Our thoughts and the thoughts of others are so often delivered in a code of our own making; a system of symbols that challenges the apparent.  It is here that our languages and signs, our gestures and our signals, share a commonality with the voices of the very existence around us. They are both there for us to decipher, a challenge like all codes, like all communication.  As communication follows a path, not rigid but flexible enough to deliver its message over and through or around obstacles.

 

This installation is comprised of wood and cloth, stone and video and is my interpretation of the confusion, the FLUX that occurs between two seemingly clear lines of sight; communication which should be adequately and instinctively translated correctly, becomes twisted and confused.  Once confusion starts, it feeds on itself and is relentlessly difficult to untangle. 

 

It is not necessary to decipher the path, it is not necessary to understand the code to enter the piece, it is clear that it is a language, and as such, like all languages, can be translated on that basis.  It is communication and as we reach out and without forethought attempt to understand.  History is an attempt to understand - civilization is the pool of memories we use to keep from forgetting what we have learned from the moment we first open our eyes.