Artist Statement
The purpose of my work is to examine our evolving species and the idea of mythology against an inconceivably vast and mainly unseen reality. With a fondness for the tactile this effort is primarily achieved by making fastidious sculpture of a size that relates personally to the viewer. My method is to create a poetic and potentially functional device and to that end I deliberately construct, fasten, bind, weave, and network materials that amplify, transmit, store, receive and modulate electrical and magnetic energy. I use surplus electrical parts and machines that connote nostalgia and alchemy from prior technical eras. Integrating the images and forms of apes, humans and other creatures into an idiosyncratic technology I signify the mortal observation, reception and exploitation of forces that in myth are the rightful possessions of gods. Using the concepts of orientation, discovery and navigation I indicate and memorialize musings, epiphanies, and insights in the contexts of maps, equipment, busts, emblems, and vessels marking the endeavors of corporeal beings relating to a sensed cosmos. Utilizing the physical properties of function, found objects, craft and context in signifying complex and elusive thoughts my art is a form of invocation and prayer. Expressions of a personal mysticism they account for our self awareness as a poignant transitive form of immortality that is bound to the infinite medium through which it experiences itself.
James Thegerstrom