Lucas Ajemian
The images below are focused on my most recent bodies of work (2015). Both are ongoing.
The first presents two elements of a concept: the willful confusion of sculpture as film, and vice versa, exploring an act of dispersion, a casting out of segments from a single work. The installation is a series of loosely defined actions and transactions toward the moment of its dismemberment into fragments or souvenirs. One element is a film showing a digitally rendered ladder, scaled by a virtual camera. The print and negative are cut and packaged into sections, to be sold by the gallery. Anoth- er element is cut pieces of an actual ladder, projected horizontally from the wall. Like many before it, this project deals the ways in which analogues and equivalents can be devised between media.
Laundered Paintings are transaction-based works where I obtain paintings to “launder”. Once ar- rangements are made with an artist to transfer the work, I soak and machine-wash it - often several times - at a Laundromat. Once a state of disintegration, I find interesting is reached, it is re-stretched and I assume authorship. Stopping the wash process, re-composing through cropping or reorienting, restores something of the authorial gesture, while also touching upon an alternate meaning of “ab- straction”: that of removing or stealing something. Abstracting the paint itself from the canvas, car- ried out not to its conclusion, but to a point where something of the painting remains, in an almost illegible state, at the border between negation and preservation.
