Marlis Jermutus:
Human beings have long divided the world into good or bad in a wide variety of forms, from spirituality to politics to interpersonal relationships and just about every other situation or model imaginable. We fall back on that division especially when we feel threatened, or when we think the world feels out of balance. And yet, despite the comfort and reassurance we may feel when we say, “I am right, you are wrong,” the choices we make and the world itself is seldom that easy to figure out. Not everything is black or white. There are always shades of gray, and in those shades one can often find the connections that we usually ignore – connections that can bridge the black and the white.
Growing out of Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics was the idea of E-Prime, or English Prime, the idea that using the verb “to be” can sometimes cause more confusion than clarity. Not everything “is” one way or the other. You can say, “John is unhappy,” but think about the difference when you say instead, “John seems unhappy when he sitting in his cubicle at work.” In the first sentence no gray area exists, John simply “is” unhappy, so no room for debate, and no admission that you have not stated a fact, but merely an opinion. No gray can exist when you say something “is” something.
If two people see a bee flying towards them, one person may think, “That bee is a danger because it may sting me,” while another person may think, “That bee is a wonder of nature because it produces honey.” We all go through life making these distinctions based on a certainty that we reinforce because of our personal psychologies. In reality, the bee possibly presents both a danger and a wonder of nature, depending on the situation we find ourselves in, and how we focus our attention.
You’d think our gray matter, our brains that make these distinctions, would take a hint from itself, recognize the gray areas, and use, more often, a little bit of judicious doubt instead of imperfect certainty.
In Marlis’ exhibition of abstract paintings using black and white paint, the metaphor of shades of gray can be imagined. Of course, these are abstract paintings, and so your imagination can project any interpretation. The title of this exhibition, “Not Everything Is Black Or White,” suggests you not overlook the gray. Whenever black touches white, there will always be some shades of gray.
Samuel Whitman:
My artwork, at its core, for me, is about exploring the nature of truth. In this world, there are things one can say that are more true than others and there are truths that are more personal than one might have capacity to share. As each moment stretches infinitely into the moment that continues on to now and now and now again, a truth that was once vibrant might become dull and uninteresting as a newer truth finds the light of day. As each truth passes through our bodies as we deem them fit for our lives, they leave marks on our stories as people. We cannot erase these marks. We might forget them or make new marks that render them in a better context, or sometimes worse if a new truth has such a bad feeling that the pain drags the whole story somewhere else we weren’t expecting to know.
Humans are such a visual species. And any mark we make to help enhance the shape others see about our inner selves is going to mean something different in each moment that a mark can be made. Such infinity in the microscopic decisions of the neural networks and muscle tensions to move a hand in such a way as to say hello… with such exact a motion that I know who you are without you speaking. And thereby comes a practiced wave, a smile in the mirror at home when no one is watching and perhaps a lie that displays the truth more clearly.
There is so much of the world that our minds are not allowed to know as we make sense of what we can. The confidence that truth is true can be corroborated but as far as I can see, only by another set of eyes meant to look at only a very small portion of the truth.
So as a process, making my art is an attempt to focus in on the truth that exists is my body. The focus becomes rational as my mind creates rules within each attempt and these rules must be bent and broken in successive attempts in order that the feelings have room to breathe. It feels like I’ve encoded the shapes with a truth. I hope that’s why my art might be interesting to people, that it describes a sort of moment that has a vibrancy. And that vibrance itself suggests truth or life. The will to grow.