RetroActive
My artistic process tends to form bodies of work that represent my material, conceptual, and stylistic interests during specific time periods. In the past I have generally exhibited these pieces together, their vocabulary enforced through the context created by the immediate proximity of closely related work. Success in the realization of a body of work is temporarily satisfying, as it leads to a sense of conclusion, however it also signifies the exhaustion of a specific approach. This demands that I adjust my methods and explore new potentials, and is when the shift from one body of work to another occurs.
When exploring new ideas, I often become hyper-focused on them, and lose interest in work belonging to groups that I have previously completed. RetroActive is an exhibition thatrepresents a challenge to this attention on only my most current working habits and their related output. Instead of "likeminded" and chronologically related work, I have chosen from works produced over the span of the last four years. These selections give representation to the multiple bodies of work in my larger oeuvre.
With a concentration on installation-based relationships, and the development of a broader context, RetroActive has reactivated these works for me, and reignited my interest in them. They now appear to me as artifacts, evidence of my many efforts. I now value them as objects for their physicality as much as for the ideas and expressiveness of their pictorial content and graphic devices. And they have again become beautiful to me, revealing the contrasts and commonality created by my evolving practice.
-Blaise Rosenthal
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