ARTIST STATEMENT by William Aghoghogbe
The function of this work is to establish a site of revelation in relation to time and space. It describes a location wherein a revelation has or will take place. The term revelation by itself does not directly imply understanding, comprehension, or retention. Sometimes information is revealed to us in impenetrable ways – often the revelation serves as the initial starting point, not the conclusion. A position of ignorance is a position most open to revelation.
I propose that both text and image are parts of a promise, or intention of understanding. Throughout the history of Christianity in what is now Great Britain, text and image literacy have been central to religious discourse and teaching. Before mass literacy, it was the image that communicated meaning – now, that role has been shared with text. The immediacy of text, however, is fragile, even when there is no language barrier. Just as an image can become uncanny through manipulations of colour and perspective, textual meaning can collapse through unexpected grammar, punctuation, or semantics.
As such, this work promises, through layered (and obscured) images, lines and text, a message, or a lesson. Whether or not it delivers seems to be up to the viewer. The structure is simple. It places not knowing above knowing, because knowing nothing is holy.
RESEARCH COMMENTARY by Annemarie Konzelman & Rebecca Walker
Much like an interdisciplinary collaboration, the idea of revelation cannot escape considerations of communication. For our project, we sought to challenge certain assumptions concerning textual and visual communication, i.e., textual communication as unambiguous and visual communication as somehow deficient, requiring language to acquire stable meaning.
Because of this, we have not concentrated on a specific text, wishing to avoid illustration or representation of a singular instance or idea of revelation. Instead, we sought to reproduce the potential for revelation to communicate a truth which pervades all time and transcends it, and which lies beyond the signifying power of words and images. We have understood divine revelation not exclusively as a temporally discrete event – a dream, a vision, a proclamation.
This reconsideration of revelation brought us to a reconsideration of the experience of interpretation, specifically related to visual and textual media. What role does mediation play in the transmission of revelation? Are individual experiences of revelation always clarifying, or might their equivocation suggest an idea of revelation which is more potential, ongoing, and fleeting?
We have explored these questions by focusing on how the content and the experience of revelation may evade direct description or representation. We have also focused on the propensity to forget, obfuscate, or lose sight of what has been revealed – in other words, on the fallibility of human faculties and signifying practices which lead to a potential understanding, potential representation, and which contain within them the possibility of loss (of truth revealed, of clarity, of meaning).