Sculpture Title: Chastity of Form.
Our western society and culture is an Apollonian line, a line drawn against nature. Districts, boundaries, objects, ideas, persons. Finite clean articulate visible.
Our temperal security against death and natures ungraspable mystery. Where the aestethic is seen as object and removed from chthonian (from the earth) reality. A triumph of the will, a mechanical universe as envisaged by Descartes and Newton where mathematics determines the form of poetry, music, architecture and art.
Cited from Camille Paglis’s book Sexual Personae
Die Reinheit der Form
Unsere westliche Gesellschaft und Kultur sind eine apollonische Linie, eine Gerade, gezogen gegen die Natur. Bezirke, Grenzen, Gegenstände, Ideen, Personen. Fein säuberlich abgegrenzt, deutlich sichtbar.
Sie sind unsere vorübergehenden Sicherheiten gegen den Tod und das unfassbare Mysterium der Natur. Ästhetik wird als Gegenstand gesehen und von der chthonisch (von der Erde stammenden) Wirklichkeit entfernt. Diese Linie ist der Triumph des Willens, ein mechanisches, wissenschaftliches Universum wie es von Descartes und Newton vorgestellt wurde, in dem Mathematik die Form von Dichtung, Musik, Architektur und Kunst bestimmt.
Zitiert aus Sexual Personae von Camille Paglis
John Power
Tuesday, 18 May 2010
Wednesday, 12 May 2010
Sculpture Title: Birth and dissolution
For all our order, quantifying and measuring and the torturing of our reasoning brains we forget that nature and not our artificial and technological society is humanities ultimate arena.
Nature will claw back it´s own.
Not the benevolent romantic mother nature of Rousseau and Wordsworth but the dark primeval goddess of archaic night. Obliteration, formlessness, dissolution, a return to the eyeless murky womb of nature and the continuum in wind and water, earth and stars.
Cited from Camille Paglis’s book Sexual Personae
Geburt und Zerfall
Über unserer ganzen Ordnung, dem System des Zählens, Messens und Wiegens und dem Bemühen unseres Verstandes vergessen wir, dass nicht unsere künstliche und technologische Gesellschaft des Menschen letztendlicher Spielraum ist, sondern die Natur.
Die Natur wird sich zurückholen, was ihr gehört und ihr eigen ist.
Es ist nicht die wohltätige, romantische Mutter Natur von Rousseau und Wordsworth, sondern die Natur der urzeitlichen Göttin archaischer Nacht. Vernichtung, Formlosigkeit, Zerfall. Die Rückkehr zur blinden, dunklen Gebärmutter der Natur und zum Kontinuum von Wind, Wasser, Erde und den Sternen.
Zitiert aus Sexual Personae von Camille Paglis
John Power
For all our order, quantifying and measuring and the torturing of our reasoning brains we forget that nature and not our artificial and technological society is humanities ultimate arena.
Nature will claw back it´s own.
Not the benevolent romantic mother nature of Rousseau and Wordsworth but the dark primeval goddess of archaic night. Obliteration, formlessness, dissolution, a return to the eyeless murky womb of nature and the continuum in wind and water, earth and stars.
Cited from Camille Paglis’s book Sexual Personae
Geburt und Zerfall
Über unserer ganzen Ordnung, dem System des Zählens, Messens und Wiegens und dem Bemühen unseres Verstandes vergessen wir, dass nicht unsere künstliche und technologische Gesellschaft des Menschen letztendlicher Spielraum ist, sondern die Natur.
Die Natur wird sich zurückholen, was ihr gehört und ihr eigen ist.
Es ist nicht die wohltätige, romantische Mutter Natur von Rousseau und Wordsworth, sondern die Natur der urzeitlichen Göttin archaischer Nacht. Vernichtung, Formlosigkeit, Zerfall. Die Rückkehr zur blinden, dunklen Gebärmutter der Natur und zum Kontinuum von Wind, Wasser, Erde und den Sternen.
Zitiert aus Sexual Personae von Camille Paglis
John Power
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Artist Statement and C.V.
Artist Statement.
In the early 1980s, I trained as an electrical technician in the Royal Air Force. Saudi Arabia 1986 working in the electrical room of an oil refinery was a revelation. I was amazed by the interiors of countless electrical cabinets, two metres high by one metre wide - an astonishing display of wires and cables in a myriad of colours and complexity, in complete contrast with their non descript grey exteriors. Thousands of connections, alive with electrical energy.
Working alone in this artificial environment, the air humming and resonating to the sound of transformers on full load, was often strange and surreal. I began to realise that I was looking into these cabinets not only through the eyes of a technician, but also through those of an artist. The German twelfth century mystic Meister Eckhart spoke in one of his sermons of hidden beauty, of flowers growing in fields and forests unseen by human eyes. I was in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, in a massive underground bunker, in a completely artificial environment, and I had seen the flowers!
Years later, I started to make my own ´devices´ or sculptures in response to that epiphany I had experienced in the Middle East. I was also endeavouring to reconcile those parts of myself that society work education and conditioning had kept apart and compartmentalized the technician, the artist, the philosopher the poet . Many of the great minds in western philosophy have considered the attempt to unite the divine and the physical within oneself to be doomed to failure. Was it possible for a technician to see profound beauty in an electrical cable installation, or does this require the sensitive nature of the artist or poet? The glass cabinet sculptures that I made were Cartesian boxes where hard, unfeeling industry was forced to cohabit with beauty and things of the spirit. The poet William Blake disagreed that this divide between the material and the spirit existed, since all is simply energy. I was using technology as a vehicle to unite all the parts of myself that had been seperated as well as showing the strange and infinite ways in which beauty can manifest itself.
The long titles of my early pieces was not only an attempt to explain the work, but an effort also to bring together as one the different elements contained within the sculptures - industry, philosophy, poetry, and art. There was also a degree of irony and cynicism in the long explanations as everything in our western culture must always be clarified defined explained. Logical, labelled, scientifically analysed, rational. Rationalism as the writer Austin Warren once said, is like scorching unrelenting sunshine, it burns the vegetation.
Nietzsche once claimed that there are many truths, and that is how I feel about my work. Defying standard classification, it belongs in a kind of nether world, one that sits uncomfortably with our ´normal´ and organised scheme of things. These machines and devices do not - and cannot - operate in an electrical or industrial environment, as their function is purely aesthetic and philosophical. However, when placed in a Gallery or natural environment, seem out of place to the onlooker because of their industrial and technological appearance. John Power.
JOHN POWER C.V.
1958 Born Bunclody County Wexford Ireland
Autodidact
Selected Exhibitions
2009 Werkschau – Group Exhibition
Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig Germany.
2007 SIGNALE - International Group Show.
Old Slaughter Yard, Ostragehege, Dresden, Germany.
DISCORD - Solo Exhibition
Archiv Massiv Gallery, Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig, Germany.
2004 Werkschau - Group Exhibition
Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig
2003 Werkschau - Group Exhibition
Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig
2002 Moved to Leipzig, Germany
Artist in the Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig
Fire Station Artist Studios Dublin Ireland.
2000 Solo-Exhibition Wexford Arts Festival , County Wexford, Ireland
Received Wexford County Bursary Award for the Visual Arts
Work exhibited at the I.T.Corporate Conference, City Hall Cork , Ireland
1997 VOLUME - Group Exhibition
Crawford Gallery, Cork
Selected by Alanna Heiss,PS 1 Gallery, NY
Work Exhibited Dublin Airport, Ireland.
Sculpture Installation Meeting House Square
Temple Bar, Dublin Ireland.
1996 Artist-in-Residence
National Sculpture Factory Cork.
1994 Anya von Gosseln Gallery, Dublin.
1991 Solo-Exhibition at Kilkenny Arts week
1990 Brownes Gallery, Dublin - Group Exhibition
In the early 1980s, I trained as an electrical technician in the Royal Air Force. Saudi Arabia 1986 working in the electrical room of an oil refinery was a revelation. I was amazed by the interiors of countless electrical cabinets, two metres high by one metre wide - an astonishing display of wires and cables in a myriad of colours and complexity, in complete contrast with their non descript grey exteriors. Thousands of connections, alive with electrical energy.
Working alone in this artificial environment, the air humming and resonating to the sound of transformers on full load, was often strange and surreal. I began to realise that I was looking into these cabinets not only through the eyes of a technician, but also through those of an artist. The German twelfth century mystic Meister Eckhart spoke in one of his sermons of hidden beauty, of flowers growing in fields and forests unseen by human eyes. I was in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, in a massive underground bunker, in a completely artificial environment, and I had seen the flowers!
Years later, I started to make my own ´devices´ or sculptures in response to that epiphany I had experienced in the Middle East. I was also endeavouring to reconcile those parts of myself that society work education and conditioning had kept apart and compartmentalized the technician, the artist, the philosopher the poet . Many of the great minds in western philosophy have considered the attempt to unite the divine and the physical within oneself to be doomed to failure. Was it possible for a technician to see profound beauty in an electrical cable installation, or does this require the sensitive nature of the artist or poet? The glass cabinet sculptures that I made were Cartesian boxes where hard, unfeeling industry was forced to cohabit with beauty and things of the spirit. The poet William Blake disagreed that this divide between the material and the spirit existed, since all is simply energy. I was using technology as a vehicle to unite all the parts of myself that had been seperated as well as showing the strange and infinite ways in which beauty can manifest itself.
The long titles of my early pieces was not only an attempt to explain the work, but an effort also to bring together as one the different elements contained within the sculptures - industry, philosophy, poetry, and art. There was also a degree of irony and cynicism in the long explanations as everything in our western culture must always be clarified defined explained. Logical, labelled, scientifically analysed, rational. Rationalism as the writer Austin Warren once said, is like scorching unrelenting sunshine, it burns the vegetation.
Nietzsche once claimed that there are many truths, and that is how I feel about my work. Defying standard classification, it belongs in a kind of nether world, one that sits uncomfortably with our ´normal´ and organised scheme of things. These machines and devices do not - and cannot - operate in an electrical or industrial environment, as their function is purely aesthetic and philosophical. However, when placed in a Gallery or natural environment, seem out of place to the onlooker because of their industrial and technological appearance. John Power.
JOHN POWER C.V.
1958 Born Bunclody County Wexford Ireland
Autodidact
Selected Exhibitions
2009 Werkschau – Group Exhibition
Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig Germany.
2007 SIGNALE - International Group Show.
Old Slaughter Yard, Ostragehege, Dresden, Germany.
DISCORD - Solo Exhibition
Archiv Massiv Gallery, Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig, Germany.
2004 Werkschau - Group Exhibition
Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig
2003 Werkschau - Group Exhibition
Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig
2002 Moved to Leipzig, Germany
Artist in the Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig
Fire Station Artist Studios Dublin Ireland.
2000 Solo-Exhibition Wexford Arts Festival , County Wexford, Ireland
Received Wexford County Bursary Award for the Visual Arts
Work exhibited at the I.T.Corporate Conference, City Hall Cork , Ireland
1997 VOLUME - Group Exhibition
Crawford Gallery, Cork
Selected by Alanna Heiss,PS 1 Gallery, NY
Work Exhibited Dublin Airport, Ireland.
Sculpture Installation Meeting House Square
Temple Bar, Dublin Ireland.
1996 Artist-in-Residence
National Sculpture Factory Cork.
1994 Anya von Gosseln Gallery, Dublin.
1991 Solo-Exhibition at Kilkenny Arts week
1990 Brownes Gallery, Dublin - Group Exhibition
Sunday, 22 November 2009
Title
Inside the Republic
Consumer Unit (supplied with User Manual)
Material: Fibreglass, electrical controls, rivets, table, base
Function: switches and operates automatically as though programmed and processing information.
Inside the Republic a state of mind, a perception, deception perhaps, from Platos Republic, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, the internal workings of the human body and mind, to be read and perceived through the writings of Descarte, Spencer's Faerie Queen, Hobbes's Leviathan, James Joyces's Ullysses ... the gradual transformation of entire peoples understanding of themselves and their sense of identity and their feelings of location within society a state in which the supreme power rests in the people or in the officers elected by them, a government of the people by the people for the people, or should one say
masses controlled by corporate interests where people are just consumers of products, producing vast amounts of senseless waste, removed through conditioned education, conformity, customary and mechanical classification, isolated more and more from each other, nature and the most precious of all things themselves.
Dimensions: 150 x 120 x 160 cm
Exhibited in the Gallery Werkschau - Group Exhibition, Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig, Germany, June 2009, Officially opened by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Inside the Republic
Consumer Unit (supplied with User Manual)
Material: Fibreglass, electrical controls, rivets, table, base
Function: switches and operates automatically as though programmed and processing information.
Inside the Republic a state of mind, a perception, deception perhaps, from Platos Republic, the Renaissance, the French Revolution, the internal workings of the human body and mind, to be read and perceived through the writings of Descarte, Spencer's Faerie Queen, Hobbes's Leviathan, James Joyces's Ullysses ... the gradual transformation of entire peoples understanding of themselves and their sense of identity and their feelings of location within society a state in which the supreme power rests in the people or in the officers elected by them, a government of the people by the people for the people, or should one say
masses controlled by corporate interests where people are just consumers of products, producing vast amounts of senseless waste, removed through conditioned education, conformity, customary and mechanical classification, isolated more and more from each other, nature and the most precious of all things themselves.
Dimensions: 150 x 120 x 160 cm
Exhibited in the Gallery Werkschau - Group Exhibition, Baumwollspinnerei Leipzig, Germany, June 2009, Officially opened by the German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Tuesday, 10 November 2009
Monday, 9 November 2009
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