Mikey Georgeson
The Nonbifurcatedman
Showcase 2015
Artist Statement- Mikey Georgeson 2015
She walks through her Sunken Dream.
Researching my doctorate proposal, The Vision of the Absurd, I unearthed Marshall McLuhan’s idea that the “Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about”. After his first album, The world of David Jones, filled the listener with the longing found “through the unknown remembered gate” (T. S. Eliot little Gidding) David Bowie deliberately looked back into the hall of mirrors and confronted the unreality of (post) modern times with cut-ups and appropriation. My paintings, here, are an attempt to negotiate between the germinal state of the former and the knowingness of the latter. My acclimatisation to this inward journey has involved ten years of morning drawings made automatically upon waking. These works represent further exploration into this cosmic realm with my categorical mind as co-pilot.
(fig above: Mikey Georgeson. It's on America's Tortured Brow -David Bowie on the Russell Harty Show- Oil on Canvas 80 x 55 cm 2015)
David Bowie has referred to the the girl in the song Life on Mars as “anomic” and her question “Is there life on Mars?” perhaps then becomes a plea, “is there meaning in the universe”? Within the song itself the answer is possibly no but the process of its creation and performance is full to the brim with significance. I had become a little fixated with asking myself how Bowie had managed to write such a wondrous song and discovered an anecdote where he describes sitting on the top deck of a bus from Beckenham to Lewisham and jumping off to return to his studio when the tune wouldn’t leave his head. The specificity of this story fills me with hope that there is indeed no algorithm for creativity and that this is the meaning when faced with the vacuum of the absurd.
Mikey Georgeson
http://mikeygeorgeson.com
contact: mikey_georgeson@me.com
Researching my doctorate proposal, The Vision of the Absurd, I unearthed Marshall McLuhan’s idea that the “Absurd is essentially a communicating to the head of some of the silent languages of the heart which in two or three hundred years it has tried to forget all about”. After his first album, The world of David Jones, filled the listener with the longing found “through the unknown remembered gate” (T. S. Eliot little Gidding) David Bowie deliberately looked back into the hall of mirrors and confronted the unreality of (post) modern times with cut-ups and appropriation. My paintings, here, are an attempt to negotiate between the germinal state of the former and the knowingness of the latter. My acclimatisation to this inward journey has involved ten years of morning drawings made automatically upon waking. These works represent further exploration into this cosmic realm with my categorical mind as co-pilot.
(fig above: Mikey Georgeson. It's on America's Tortured Brow -David Bowie on the Russell Harty Show- Oil on Canvas 80 x 55 cm 2015)
David Bowie has referred to the the girl in the song Life on Mars as “anomic” and her question “Is there life on Mars?” perhaps then becomes a plea, “is there meaning in the universe”? Within the song itself the answer is possibly no but the process of its creation and performance is full to the brim with significance. I had become a little fixated with asking myself how Bowie had managed to write such a wondrous song and discovered an anecdote where he describes sitting on the top deck of a bus from Beckenham to Lewisham and jumping off to return to his studio when the tune wouldn’t leave his head. The specificity of this story fills me with hope that there is indeed no algorithm for creativity and that this is the meaning when faced with the vacuum of the absurd.
Mikey Georgeson
http://mikeygeorgeson.com
contact: mikey_georgeson@me.com
Open night performance by Mikey Georgeson "Sit here no ram Files - Is there life on Mars?" June 2015
Exhibition view "As I ask you to focus on"
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