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Undercast exhibition statement

artist statement from

Undercast: Navigating Blindness

undercast \UHN-der-kast\, noun;

Something viewed from above through another medium, as of clouds viewed from an airliner.

 

 

Is there a filter or mechanism that allows us to cope with a world where we are increasingly, endlessly subjected to stimuli generated by an omnipotent media?

Does it keep us sane, or progressively make us blind?

Brett Phares reveals our relations to a media that is driven to multi-switched distraction, how heterogeneous elements accumulate into unpredictable associations—at once to be viewed as discrete lyrical objects in which historical and personal memory converge, and within a larger corpus predicated on the simultaneous avowal and disavowal of narrative unity—that are tamed here into coherent packets of information.

The show itself invokes infinitely varied associations, both inviting and undermining an overall coherent story, training our senses to cope with our media saturated world. The works exist both literally, as radiant centers emerging from navigation and communication tools, and metaphorically (from metaphorein, travel) as self-referential manipulations of media that evoke our perpetual (and aimless) change of focus.

Brett Phares unites erroneous ways to the rhetorical strategies employed to develop artifacts, built on eminently unassuming objects that spark internal associations of eclectic and unpredictable intertexts.

 

His art sheds light on the intellectual and bodily disorientation, the surrender to ethical perdition of lives spent traveling through media domains seemingly at the extreme limits of imaginable experience, suspended in a space where the bounds between reality and illusion are confused. The key question to address is not what Brett Phares’ artifacts are about, but rather what position they adopt in the fluidity of perception they depict.