Timothy Kadish
American, born 1981, Haverhill, Massachusetts
My work is an ongoing account, a product of negotiating stimuli from “everyday” happenings I refer to as “visual education.” I respond to the varied visual phenomena with forms and ways of marking. To be clear, it is the organization of the elements that I am interested in. To arrange and record is to acknowledge and to reconcile. And as a student and product of Art History, I tend to combine numerous (informed) techniques; all working together in an arranged format creating a sort of “functional order,” often within the landscape template.
This work began with an inner debate on the nature of “contemporary.” While looking at the varied human cultures of the past and present, I began to wonder how they might view and decipher a “contemporary” or present set of iconography as I sought to understand theirs. Taking into account issues such as environment, Art history, and my 33 years (1981-current), I began to arrange and edit the pieces of this “visual education.” I see the work as playgrounds for my specific brand of iconography with material sets tied to the traditional and the modern industrial complex. I use the materials, the mediums as variables in an equation… always directing the mark-making techniques in each piece. Furthermore, I seek an alchemical sensibility in the way I fold, scratch, torch and brush my paintings.
I am interested in a space of becoming. A sort of diagram or gathering of matter represented as sign and symbol, often involving a communicative marking structure that has been derived from or inspired by atomic structures, graphic image, diagram, mathematics, biochemical formulae, written language, etc.
These symbols and marks have begun to distill into fewer and more absolute forms of the apple w/core, flower, mushroom, stellar cloud, snake, etc. Some shapes have been adopted and modified, others have evolved from painting to painting, though all possess a larger identity: such as the mushroom as ICON or the apple as CHOICE. Furthermore, these shapes seek to grow into a modern edifice, yet still maintain its’ ties to the traditional mythologies that bore it. Essentially, I paint with the premise of research and exploration, but I am driven by an eagerness to clarify my relations with the creative condition, while contributing to the storehouse of expression that is our contemporary mythology.
Artist Statement
I am interested in a space of becoming. A sort of diagram or gathering of matter represented as sign and symbol; often involving a communicative marking structure that is derived from or inspired by atomic structures, graphic image, diagram, mathematics, biochemical formulae, written language, etc. […] Essentially, I paint with the premise of research and exploration, but I am driven by an eagerness to clarify my relations with the creative condition, while contributing to the storehouse of expression that is our contemporary mythology.