Of Waves and Strata | Adrienne Ranson

Of Waves and Strata was created in response to the prerequisites for a group show of nine artists from Auckland and Whakatane held at Whakatane Art Gallery and Museum 2008.

The group show is titled ‘u r here’.

The prerequisites were to create an image in response to a place in the Eastern Bay of Plenty region. The place I was designated (one of a choice of 3) was Kohi Point, an area from which you can look out across the Rangitaiki Planes.

In response to this site I drew upon geological diagrams of seismic movements and aerial mapping of land masses of the Rangitaiki Planes, as well as alveoli structures in female breast tissue. I was also looking closely at Paul Klee’s (1879-1940) image Ad Parnassus (1932) (Chevalier, 1979, p.155) which was influenced, in part, by Byzantine mosaics, as well as experimenting with the broken line and dab in brush work.

The title ‘Of Waves and Strata” refers to the geophilosophy and geopolitics of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. ‘Stratum’ are described as acts of capture or code. They are “judgements of God” in that they refer to the perception of phenomena in terms of binary relations. As forms of stratification, binary relations imprison intensities and singularities into perceptions of difference between inside and outside, a perception of difference encapsulated in the notion of a creator God who creates the subjects and objects of this world. My intention is to attempt to visually ‘dismantle the organism’ or experience of dichotomy, while paradoxically creating a dichotomy to do so.

As Deleuze and Guattari write; “ Dismantling the organism has never meant killing yourself, but rather opening the body to connections that presuppose an entire assemblage, circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity….” (1987, p.160).

For me, ‘Of Waves and Strata” is an affirmation of art-making in which matter is imbued with the effort to render life sensible in its zones of indeterminacy: between the cosmic and the elemental. This manner of thinking puts impermanence, movement, becoming, the folding-in and folding-out of multiple and proliferative relations at the focus and epicentre of perception. Thus the ‘Waves’ of the title refers to the perceptible and imperceptible movements within the becoming nature of all phenomena, wherein the movement between things are the relations that produce experience. For “the earth constantly eludes judgement, flees and becomes destratified, decoded, deterritorialised” (ibid, p.41).

In “Of Waves and Strata” art-making and art-image is a manner of collecting relations of difference between inside and outside, Kohi Point and geopolitics, Paul Klee and the movement of the brush, of my extractions, compressions and expansions of the thinking of Deleuze and Guattari and other sensibilities and sensations of significance and subjectification that capture my interest in an attempt to simultaneously experience for myself and convey visually an awareness of the immutability of life.

References:

Chevalier, Denys (1979). Klee. Naefels, Switzerland: Bonfini Press.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix. (1987)(Trans. Brian Mussini). A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press