Obscurations | Industry, Use Your Head, Kindness | Five Points Gallery, 2024

Obscurations

Artist’s Statement

What is sacrificed in ‘static’ description is that infinitely complex association among words and concepts without which we would lack any sense at all that we have understood anything of the infinite abundance of reality. * Werner Heisenberg

This Obscuration Series was conceived after a 2016 hike in "Dog Town", Gloucester, Massachusetts where there are a group of boulders with words cut into them. Roger Babson hired out of work Scandinavian stonecutters in 1928 to carve into each, words and phrases he considered to be Yankee/American values. His choices were interesting to me, especially in lieu of this country's political climate. In choosing ten of these “word values", I began an examination of lost or obscured meaning and the possibility of expressing visually, the tensions between the static and the dynamic. What happens when words lose depth of meaning and the uses become careless and appropriated for destructive reasons?

In these paintings, the words are obscured by mark-making to various degrees. The color and materiality of the paint and brushwork convey their own language and participate in both covering up and responding to the graphic nature of the text. The color palettes and compositions provide a dynamism in relationship to the words and their lost vitality.

This project is beginning to include canvases with the words or phrases repeated as exemplified by, Obscuration: BE TRUE x 6. While, so far, the word choices are Roger Babson's, there will be paintings that have words that diverge from his.

Susan Bogle Finnegan, September 2024

*William Egginton, Quantum Poetics: How Borges and Heisenberg converged on the notion that language both enables and interferes with our grasp of reality. (essay)