Laurie Hogin will discuss a selection of works from the past 30 years as well as the works in the exhibition, Total Body Burden, currently in the Hiestand Galleries, with an emphasis on my strategies for making meaning. I use animal allegory and other representational tropes including symbol and metaphor, and the related concept of “framing” (cognitive, linguistic, and pictorial) to convey states of emotional being and resulting behaviors.
Art, like all culture-making, involves a process wherein the sum-total of an artist’s biology and experience is subject to synthesis, producing objects and behaviors understood as works of art—material expressions of embodied, cognitive “framing” of the world. Such objects and behaviors differentiate themselves among taxonomies of human activity by having no predetermined purpose (art markets and structures of institutional prestige notwithstanding) and by foregrounding aesthetic or affective experience using material as metaphor. My work focuses on the affective aesthetics of pictures and of “framing”, both literal (using the frame of the painting, literal picture frames, and the architectural environs of such works) and conceptual. Throughout my career I’ve made paintings, frames, furniture, and occasional sculptural objects, with a focus on such metaphors, and will discuss the creative impulses and processes that produced these works.
