While writing down a childhood memory about his inept handwriting, the wet ink from freshly written letters transferred onto the skin along the outer edge of the artist’s hand, while some of it was pressed back onto the paper. Observing both the page and his hand, he became more fascinated by the visual presence of the stains than by the text itself. His attention shifted from letters and words as signifiers to the shapes and constellations of the stains as involuntary traces of writing.
Through processes of magnification and site-specific re-inscription, Sambolec works with these stains as autonomous visual forms. He explores their idiosyncratic, irregular shapes as visual elements that are neither illustrations, symbolic representations, nor abstractions, but incomprehensible forms that nevertheless radiate familiarity. The artist embraces this unobvious resonance by adopting a non-interpretative gaze – one closer to “listening to shapes” as an act of heightened attention and enthusiastic fascination, than looking at them as an act of interpretation.
Guided solely by sensitivity to their graphic presence, he makes site-specific constellations of selected enlarged stain particles that are composed in close relation to their surroundings. Through these configurations the work reframes the involuntary traces of voluntary activity as visual encounters with a parallel world we unknowingly create while we engage in everyday activities.
The world we make without naming it.
A trace of touching nothingness.
Join us for an artist sharing session with Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, focusing on his practice in sound, new media and questions of contemporary mediation in relation to the sense of bodily presence. The session will further reflect on how these ideas take form in Involuntary Writing, his exhibition at Blank Canvas, followed by an exchange with KY Leong, founder of Blank Canvas.