PB: There appears to be a continual dialectic concerning our changing perceptions of the meaning of nature and environment in our lives and in our culture, where you seem to break down the terms in which forms can be assembled, an expression of an ever-building homogeny in the perception of our surroundings.
MJ: A more media-saturated, information-based society means a heightened sense of context as the core of establishing meaning. I am interested in how nature used to be about context in its purest form, and as close to the truth as possible.
From the perspective of science, as well as the religions of animist cultures, it was cyclical and its individual creatures were one with their environs. While it is true that we are intruding and diminishing this territory, I am more preoccupied with the possibility that human beings still aspire to fulfil an imperative to be at one with the environment.
It is a balance that involves more than the dualism implied by the mind-body problem but includes the wild card factor of an unfixed and shifting context informed by class, culture, belief, and space itself. Since “nature” at the fringes can kill you, it has always had an element of the romantic and spiritual.
At the same time, nature in itself is unaware of time and so without us does not exist. As such, it is always in the visceral present. This perpetual immediacy relates to my own interest in the relevance of sculpture in a world already overflowing with objects.
There seem to be two paths to homogeny in our culture: one is through assimilation and the other is through adaptation. While assimilation deals with absorption of information shaped by dominant norms, only adaptation sets the individual up for the ability to make decisions based on experience/knowledge and establish a potential for change/transformation.
Only adaptation is capable of allowing both abstraction and representation. In my work, nature takes the form of the representational (from coyotes to taxidermied mosquitoes to flax nooses), while energy is abstract (from calories to salt crystals to sweat).
These two terms are always vying for balance in the work, ice crystals growing on a corpse, salt as a by-product of sweat entering the bloodstream of an elk.
PB: Would you agree that the temporal nature of your work is a major factor in your perceptions of the fluid nature of identity? As the process is undergone, or at least discussed, there is an ever-changing quality to identity, dependent on perspective, the view of identity as physicality, a forensic examination of material in juxtaposition with spiritual associations that collide.
MJ: Yes. Identity can be seen as fleeting, the equivalent to living. Something always just beyond our grasp, a basis for human motivation informed by dreams and desire. It is dependent not only on our view of self, but also, simultaneously and sometimes uncomfortably, on the views of those around us.
PB: Would you say that there is an allusion to a temporal cycle in your work, for instance in works such as "Salt Transfer Cycle and Circannual Rhythm (pibloktok)"? The process of journey and action seems to go beyond the consumption and transformation of energy on a merely physical plane to suggest spiritual renewal or re-incarnation, metaphorically speaking, a cyclical evolution of almost Buddhist proportions.
MJ: My work has always dealt directly with an overload of information as a way to access the intuitive in the art-making (and receiving) process. In the video works, seemingly unorganised and shapeless content is given structure by time and actions.
This structure has elements of the linear and cyclical; it is present in some way in all of my work. Just as information implies a truth, so do the contradictions in this content; they inform our choices, and therefore our individual identities imply a balance point.
The moment of balance defies choice and could be seen as both eternal and ephemeral. Perhaps one idea of faith and spiritual renewal could be seen as the human drive to repeat that moment of balance combined with the fear of losing one’s identity.
I imagine the diagrammatic shape of this process to be like a spiral from above and spring-like from the side. This relates to an optimism in the work, as the form is both two and three dimensional, real and imagined, and therefore perfect and something to aspire to.
The idea of the cyclical reflects the nature of the work as well. I am not interested in producing identifiable groups of art along a linear timeline. I guess there is “spiritual renewal” through “re-incarnation” of themes within the work (to twist your words), with their significance to the larger project of the whole body of work existing as an evolving proposition.
Read the first article in conversation with artist Michael Joo
