entheogen
featured projects
©2024 entheogen design(...) 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 (...)
romona maturano & braden perryman
materials: laser cut props, white latex paint, found object assemblage, projected light, collaged paper and printed images, our bodies
dimensions: installation in photography studio
working iteratively, we began with favorite images we had both taken - of street signs, tree bark, textures, graphic designs, and sculptures. we printed these images and physically collaged them, introducing rips, tears, cuts, and folds into the composition. we then scanned these collages and flattened them, sending them through illustrator’s image trace function. we then printed these scanned and digitally manipulated images, and subjected them to an additional round of collage and deterioration. we then scanned these second round collages, and digitally manipulated them further. next, we projected these images into a photography studio and onto a variety of assembled props, including fabric, pedestals, and lasercut linework generated from the original collaged photographs. in the installation, light splashed and flowed across surfaces and our bodies - we captured photographs from this performance/installation, which are presented above. our iterative process yielded these digital images, alongside physical artifacts including a series of paintings we created based on the photographs. lastly, we created a zine by hand that documented our process and design philosophy (see excerpt below).
zine - 1,2,3,4
zine 1,2,3,4: laser engraved cover
stage 1-2: collage textures
stage 3: project and photograph
phase 4: lasercut paintings
an excerpt from part “0” of zine 1,2,3,4 - in conversation with the artists (Braden & Romona)
B: We were interested in exploring an iterative process that ‘pulls’ the work through a variety of mediums, both ‘degrading’ the original image yet complexifying and transforming the original image with each step. Yet in opposition to the process of ‘deep frying’ a meme, we thought that the stages of the process, if adhered to intuitively/blindly, could lead us towards a more perfect aesthetic form or outcome, rather than a lesser form or outcome, i.e. data gained rather than data lost. Each work thus bears the traces of all prior steps, as well as the order in which they were performed inherently within its outward appearance. In this way, each image gathered a ‘patina’ (a weathering or corrosive layer that develops over time and exposure to certain sets of conditions) that ultimately lended the work some sense of temporal age or gradual sedimentary accumulation, despite the fact that the entire body of work was completed in less than two weeks. Pieces were not treated as ‘precious,’ rather as whimsical playthings, a small world where no action was a mistake (a faulty action, a source of blame, mired in authorial intent), rather simply a series of accidents (chance occurrences, outside the realm of pure agency, unfolding somewhere between the affordances of the material and the inclinations of the authors) that themselves gained lives of their own and ‘offered’ us glimpses into what they could become, or could have become, should alternative pathways have been followed. Each work thus offered a sense of multiplicity collapsing towards singularity, many branching possible pathways that self-resolved into the final collaged, then projected, then cut and painted elements. The ‘work,’ as we see, it exists in hybrid digital/material space, somewhere ‘in-between’ the physical collages, the scanned and photographed images, and the physical paintings. Working with and within this realm of liminality was important to us, as it is the medium of experience itself - nondual, nonlinear, ephemeral, fleeting, and largely ineffable.
R: I for one don’t believe in individual failing- the idea someone's failures are an indication of some shortcoming of which they are solely responsible for. Not only am I always actively being shaped by the external world, but so too are my reactions to the external world deeply conditioned. And where else could that conditioning originate from apart from the world? And that is not to say we don’t possess any agency or choice, but rather we are deeply interrelated. In that same way I don’t feel like I can make any claim to any of the things that I currently possess or are being granted to me. I do not feel like I possess any will outside of that greater flow. Rather, I am simply an instrument or a vessel for something larger.
B: This idea - that our embodied ‘selves’ do not stop at the boundaries of our skin, but rather ‘reach out’ into the world, emerging through a dance with the materiality of things and other embodied selves, was important to us - the idea of individual authorship being a delusion, an ego-trip, born of the modern, western concept of the ‘self’ as bounded individual agent. I particularly resonate with your description of the role we play as simple conduits for greater flows of social and aesthetic discourses - all authors fulfill this role as vessel, whether they acknowledge it or not. At this point it is worth noting the following positions, which touch at something very close to the essence of the conversation the work attempts to participate in:
“If you have an idea you’re excited about and you don’t bring it to life, it’s not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker. This isn’t because the other artist stole your idea, but because the idea’s time has come.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
And again, in the concept of ‘steam engine time:’
“Nobody knows why the steam engine happened when it did. Ptolemy demonstrated the mechanics of the steam engine, and there was nothing technically stopping the Romans from building big steam engines. They had little toy steam engines, and they had enough metalworking skill to build big steam tractors. It just never occurred to them to do it.”
- William Gibson, in a 2011 interview in The Paris Review
In other words, people don’t find ideas: ideas find people.
R: Acknowledging our own role - as simple windsocks registering the larger cosmic-human flow - the zeitgeist, if you will - we began exploring circular or iterative time as measured in degrees of increasing unrecognizability. In other words, the degradation or disintegration of the familiar through exposure to the ebb and flow through and within the currents of time. We became fascinated with approaching how we could be harness this change, and in so doing become agents of change itself - using our actions as conduits of change - to involve ourselves in the process in which our aim is to stretch and distort, to metamorphosize and decay the familiar through a multistage process, and in doing so, create revolutions of transformation. What we found was that the material was not the only thing transformed: our selves, also stretched through too many roles: the bricoleur, the assembler of the piecemeal, the performer, the image-maker, the technologist, the perspectival view-finder, the editor, the creator, the destroyer, the actualizer. What we found was that our own selves were made unfamiliar yet more intimately known through the fluidity of roles, roles ever necessarily changing through the fluidity of medium- and process- translation. Only through eroding our own self-boundaries were we able to serve more fully as conduits for the work, which began to create itself of its own accord.
B: In this way, what the artwork ended up being ‘about’ was not so much the physicality of the work, the process of decay, or even its hybrid existence in digital space, but rather the very formative impact it had upon ourselves, the makers of the work, and by extension, we hope, those who engage with the work with open eyes and receptive minds, and experience it for what it is and what it does, rather than interpret what it represents or what it means.
We hope you enjoy this limited edition print of the work.
Sincerely yours,
Romona Maturano & Braden Perryman