Artist Martin Kippenberger said that to “simply hang a painting on the wall and say that its art is dreadful. The whole network is important! Even spaghettini....” (1).
This installation is part of an ongoing interest I have in the relationship between images, objects, language, and representation. The work takes the form of paintings sitting on top of a hand drawn wall treatment with a sculptural component. I imagine the space between these things as Kippenberger’s “spaghettini”. I am interested in the slippage that happens between this web. How does this network of things inform, complicate, and influence each other? It is my hope that the transitive (2) passage from image to object to text generates something meaningful and unique between viewers.
The title of this installation is derived from a list of words I archived during the past year. I have used this list as a jumping off point for making much of my work over the past year. They are emotive responses which reflect the urgency of a specific moment in time. They also reflect the complex network of things felt over a period of time. How do we feel relief and woe simultaneously?
1. “One Has to Be Able to Take It!” excerpts from an interview with Martin Kippenberger by Jutta Koether, November 1990–May 1991, in Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective, ed., Ann Goldstein, (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), p. 316.
2. “Painting Beside Itself” by David Joselit in October, vol. 130, 2009. P. 128.
Connor Charlesworth is a Canadian contemporary visual artist currently based in Kelowna, BC. He received his MFA from the University of Victoria (2018) with a specialization in painting, and his BFA from the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, BC (2015). He has exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in Canada and exhibited in student exhibitions abroad in Bulgaria and Egypt. He has taught drawing and painting at the University of Victoria, Thompson Rivers University, and currently, the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna.
