Artist's Statement (p. 14)

Artist’s Statement
Curt Bozif

At its most basic level my work is concerned with drawing attention to the beauty of human activities/efforts and their effects positioned within/against their own transient nature. More specifically, the content of my work gestures toward a preoccupation with the subject's psychological economy and movement within ideology (religious, political, and socio-economic), i.e. the dialectic struggle that is the subject's simultaneous resistance to and reliance upon the social Other. In my work these concepts find signifiers in an economy where mundane material objects (such as brick, carpet, and ball-point pen), the tools of execution (such as hammers, compasses, and rulers), processes (such as the lifting of fingerprints from random objects), and formal elements (color, shape) in conjunction with one another, give themselves, that is, their literal material properties, over to the meanings they are provided by the very nature of their functioning within the practice of everyday life. In this sense, the drawing of countless straight parallel lines in blue ball-point pen, significantly with the aid of a ruler, may activate connotations to the reified, homogeneous, and expendable worker/individual (the mass produced ball-point pen) exercised by a higher authority (the ruler) through an assembly-line process (the systematic stacking of repeated marks). In addition to the logic of its symbolic order, my work is overtly process based and labor intensive, involving the repetition of simple gestures and tasks such as standing still and walking in circles on carpet, boring through chalkboard with sandpaper, and crushing brick by hand. The intensity of the labor process and the familiarity of its material parts should function (ideally) as an entry point to the work, heightening both the viewer's sense of the time and efforts required for the realization of any certain goal, i.e. the human endeavors that give definition to the world that surrounds them. Obsessive in its execution and succinctly closed logic, my work is imbued with an absurd and at times pathetic (though undeniable) seriousness that may seem trivial next to the want that is the product of such efforts. Through my work, I attempt to fathom the nature of a humanity that is assailed on both sides in the struggle between order and chaos, orthodoxy and innovation, the eternal and the ephemeral. Lastly, if at all possible, through these activities I aspire to heighten one's sensitivity to the (un)redeemable, to those most authentic of moments that seem forever lost to each of us in the constant movement of days.