Language and Art

I believe that art and literature go hand in hand. Writing and creating a work of art are very similar, and I'm sure many writers feel what they do is just that. They both deal with being with a certain vision of what is supposed to come out of the experience. Both are a process, and the final result may not necessarily be what we had intended from the beginning, but it becomes a reflection of the process itself. These ideas become prevalent in the works of many artists.

Scott Kim is an artist known for his puzzles and art that he creates using language. He creates works that play on both the definition of the word and visual space in which the words exist. For example, this particular piece called Mirror, creates an illusion where the word "mirror" is actually a mirrored image of itself. Combines visual meaning with understood meaning. His work is very clever and often very elaborate.

I’m actually very interested in the idea of language as a game and connecting art with literature, because I have utilized these ideas in the past for my own artwork. I created a recent work of video art that deals with illusions in words and that there are many layers to words. I was a performance piece of video where painted on a larger piece of canvas while a video projected onto the canvas. The video was of myself painting onto a canvas as well. As the performance goes on, the viewer sees that I am painting the word “false” onto the canvas. The projection is painting the top half of the letters and the actual me is painting the bottom half. As the piece goes on, it becomes more clear that the actual me is painting the words “true,” but they appear to be “false” when paired with the projection.

The work plays on the idea that in the process of creating art we come reality and hyper-reality (true and false) in order to create art. Art cannot be created without first creating some sort of falsehood. Learning to understand art is a process of being able to separate the true and the false. By separating the two the viewer learns that a piece that appears straight forward, as many layers to it.