Artists' Television Access

TOBAN NICHOLS: Motion Paintings

June 2, 2003 - June 30, 2003

My work has a narrative related to video, TV, or film, and referes to painting in it’s use of colour, pattern, and space. It is about the texture, light, motion, and mirroring qualities of surface, and about investigating a specific moment by lengthening and magnifying it. I do this by using sampled and manipulated video of scrambled cable signal, sonograms, or television. I make decisions on subject matter through my ongoing fascination with nostalgia and memory, or my overriding obession with certain phrases, people, and objects. I listen to songs, watch pieces of video, say certain things, or eat something repeatedly until I am sick of it and no longer feel the thrill of the obsession.

My work is also about altering the perception of the viewer with the sublimation of images through the viewing device and installation; video playing on a side-turned television that has been electronically altered to show full image video on eight pixels of space in the centre of the screen. Or the way in which electronic cables are “drawn” on the floor, with towers of nostalgic components stacked around.

The work creates and utilizes a language of images. This language is manipulated into a motion/video format that aims to inspire mental connections with music and dance. it can evoke alternating feelings of meditation and irritation. The resulting techno-images raise queries about the contamination of art by technology and whether a mechanical, art making process ultimately removes the soul from a work of art. In the end, can an intimate connection with emotion be established between the viewer, and the work?