Artist Statement Example - Todji Kurtzman
My sculptures are created from intuition, discipline and a journey of spiritual realization. My intellectual understanding of what I create, summarized below, develops long after the execution of the work.
Michelangelo employed a forced perspective technique when he made the top of David proportionally bigger. Sculptors throughout the ages have employed the forced perspective technique to make their monuments appear to have correct proportions when seen from below. In my work, I apply a signature interpretation to this age old technique -with the exact opposite intent.
Our eye helps us to estimate the size and distance of things by making far away objects look smaller. Just as a skyscraper appears to be narrower at the top, I give my sculptures the illusion of great depth by employing the spatial language of our eye and mind -but subverting it to alternative meaning in the material plane.
Drawing upon the invisible inner workings of our minds, the exaggerated proportions of my sculpture make visible the "image" that the brain "sees" of our bodies when one is lost in inspired movement. At peak moments of concentration, one's body disappears and the appendage of focus becomes all encompassing in the mind's eye.
In science, this concept has a parallel called the Homunculus. The Homunculus explains the disproportionate amount of brain area that is assigned to the more sensitive areas of the body such as the lips, tongue, hands, feet and genitals. These sensitive areas are theorized to appear "bigger" in the brain's “view” of the body.
In the meeting of the scientific and spiritual planes my sculptures function as vessels for the contemporary descendants of the ancient fertility goddesses and gods. They conjure, in 21st century vernacular, the ancient mystery described by Joseph Campbell as "aesthetic arrest through the living object."
My sculptures make welcome the West’s displaced archetypes of nature divinity, individual divinity, goddess power, fertility, virility, yin and yang, which are all encompassed by Todji’s principle of Infinite Spiritual Truths.
An "Enthusiast," as defined by anthropologist Lewis Hyde, is a person who finds spiritual expression through the body. The practitioners of Candomble, Santeria, Vodun, Sufism, indigenous religions and Dionysian temple dancers of ancient Greece, all practice(d) codified rhythms and dances to enter ecstatic states for community and personal transformation. While I was raised culturally removed from this practice, I can look back upon a lifetime pursuit of this expression.
In my work I collaborate with dancers, musicians, and urban shaman; African, Latin, post-modern, modern, capoeira and experimental. I am enamored with Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban music and dance. I consider my involvement and exploration of these spiritual dance and music forms, and their mythologies, as a way to expand the metaphysical consciousness of my work.
I sculpt in clay and cast in bronze because I believe my work will stand the test of time and the 3000 year longevity of bronze is an antithesis to our culture of the disposable.
If human beings in the 21st century are to avert mutually assured ecological destruction, mainstream cultures must re-discover, re-tell and thus re-live our nature harmonious mythologies. My contribution to this imperative mythological transformation is to express our instinctual knowing as beings within the natural world, and give contemporary form, as have sculptors throughout the ages, to the ancient and fundamental expression of the Living Object.
Michelangelo employed a forced perspective technique when he made the top of David proportionally bigger. Sculptors throughout the ages have employed the forced perspective technique to make their monuments appear to have correct proportions when seen from below. In my work, I apply a signature interpretation to this age old technique -with the exact opposite intent.
Our eye helps us to estimate the size and distance of things by making far away objects look smaller. Just as a skyscraper appears to be narrower at the top, I give my sculptures the illusion of great depth by employing the spatial language of our eye and mind -but subverting it to alternative meaning in the material plane.
Drawing upon the invisible inner workings of our minds, the exaggerated proportions of my sculpture make visible the "image" that the brain "sees" of our bodies when one is lost in inspired movement. At peak moments of concentration, one's body disappears and the appendage of focus becomes all encompassing in the mind's eye.
In science, this concept has a parallel called the Homunculus. The Homunculus explains the disproportionate amount of brain area that is assigned to the more sensitive areas of the body such as the lips, tongue, hands, feet and genitals. These sensitive areas are theorized to appear "bigger" in the brain's “view” of the body.
In the meeting of the scientific and spiritual planes my sculptures function as vessels for the contemporary descendants of the ancient fertility goddesses and gods. They conjure, in 21st century vernacular, the ancient mystery described by Joseph Campbell as "aesthetic arrest through the living object."
My sculptures make welcome the West’s displaced archetypes of nature divinity, individual divinity, goddess power, fertility, virility, yin and yang, which are all encompassed by Todji’s principle of Infinite Spiritual Truths.
An "Enthusiast," as defined by anthropologist Lewis Hyde, is a person who finds spiritual expression through the body. The practitioners of Candomble, Santeria, Vodun, Sufism, indigenous religions and Dionysian temple dancers of ancient Greece, all practice(d) codified rhythms and dances to enter ecstatic states for community and personal transformation. While I was raised culturally removed from this practice, I can look back upon a lifetime pursuit of this expression.
In my work I collaborate with dancers, musicians, and urban shaman; African, Latin, post-modern, modern, capoeira and experimental. I am enamored with Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Cuban music and dance. I consider my involvement and exploration of these spiritual dance and music forms, and their mythologies, as a way to expand the metaphysical consciousness of my work.
I sculpt in clay and cast in bronze because I believe my work will stand the test of time and the 3000 year longevity of bronze is an antithesis to our culture of the disposable.
If human beings in the 21st century are to avert mutually assured ecological destruction, mainstream cultures must re-discover, re-tell and thus re-live our nature harmonious mythologies. My contribution to this imperative mythological transformation is to express our instinctual knowing as beings within the natural world, and give contemporary form, as have sculptors throughout the ages, to the ancient and fundamental expression of the Living Object.
http://www.todjikurtzman.com/
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