Bud and Betty Micheels
student artist-in-residence grant

DARREN TESAR 2006-07

The combination of video onto my barely painted canvases urges the viewer to reexamine the concepts of the still in the moving. Archival medical videos projected onto the canvas itself, communicate preservation and sustainment. The graphic and outdated practices are then looped to further stress this confinement. The loop is forced to exist in a state of repetition that results in no beginning or end. I believe this leaves no room for a transcending resolution. Only in the existence of repetition and predictability does the video mirror that of a painting. The video moves endlessly, yet is no more than a single representation juxtaposed against another single image, the painting.

The subject matter in my painting takes on iconic interpretations of nostalgia and control. Imagery of architecture and objects, such as airports and whoopee cushions are stripped of their original context and thinly dry brushed onto a blank canvas. Without the objects' original context it stands to be reinterpreted with the supplemented video.

I appropriate all my images from the Internet. This use of imagery perpetuates an objective indifference to the subjects' original context and exploits it for its intellectual significance.

Thematically my goals are existential in nature, and attempt to investigate ontology in a postmodern setting. The narratives that I employ circle closely around the absurd. I use absurd to mean the futility in attempting to construct absolute conclusions and meaning in the images I compose, and in larger meta-narratives of our existence. It is my desire to romanticize this relationship we have with ourselves in the midst of nothingness. These questions concern our humanness, with its temporal existence, which will be outlived by that which we create. My work attempts to address these questions with poignancy and honesty.

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should live to stretch out over the whole time. --Albert Camus

Whether You Stumble or Stride