celebrating

Paul Glabicki
artist's bio

ARTIST'S STATEMENT:
In my work, an endless chain of new images, relationships, memories, experiences, and associations can be generated from a central image, object, or place. I look, read, observe, or remember from a personal perspective that filters and processes information, dissects relationships of parts to the whole, encodes layers of meaning and representation. Perception is a tool. Collecting, searching, listening, documenting experiences, discovering alternate viewings and readings of the familiar, responding with curiosity about the unfamiliar, revealing or imposing layers of information, and taking the risks that come with creative thought expand the process. Much of this process is keenly, obsessively analytical and objective, but it is also combined with the seemingly opposite strategy of applying intuition, chance, and improvisation.
There is even more, especially an eagerness to experiment. I like to organize space and time that draws from my interest and experience (and often concurrent work) in painting, drawing, photography, installation art, sound, filmmaking, and digital media. I attempt to create works that can only be created in the media of choice. There are critical reasons to explore an idea in a static composition (photograph, drawing, painting), or in a temporal one (sound, computer/film animation, film, video). In the end, the work, thinking and creative process are orchestrated by an eccentric drive to examine what I experience, and a personal need to shape form, space, and time – and make things. I also learn from looking at the things I make, collect, or document. Often time, an exhibition context, or work on a new project reveals new layers of meaning in an earlier work. Certain deliberate visual strategies also evolve. I often create complex abstract spaces that grow and expand from a figurative "anchor" image, sounds, or object. Some "anchors" have become thematic motifs in my work (I often use chairs to give viewers a reference point for human scale). There is an interest in collage, in juxtaposition, and in creating vivid, if often physically impossible relationships and situations. I've always focused on creating delicate balances between figurative and abstract representation that sometimes erupt into tense collisions, and at other times relax into lyrical harmony. There are other influences or models at work: semiotics, early Russian formalist cinema, Cubist cinema, principles of synesthesia, Oscar Fischinger, Hans Richter, cultural contexts and foreign environments, novels, pop culture, and more.
Whether an encounter with one of my works is an intense bombardment, an investigation of rational or seemingly irrational complexity, or an entry into an environment that is both alien and familiar, I hope that the work is challenging, playful, and indeed a visual and aural experience unique to the work and its medium.