Ken Resseger - Statement and CV

KEN RESSEGER info ger.resse@gmail.com SELECTED WORKS IMAGE ARCHIVE

Abstraction in the original sense of the word is the distilling of forms and ideas into simple and assimilatable chunks. I take the opposite approach in accumulating those distilled chunks and iconic veins from existing material and building chimerical forms as if they were basic compositional elements or line. A foundation of collage leads to hand drawn templates which may contain hundreds of uniquely developed components. Each specific part of the template is altered and distorted further in stages by the final media in an inbreeding and evolution of visual elements and narratives.

The open-yet-directed process can neither be replicated by the generative aspect of the subconscious that prefaces the blank page nor dictated completely by the logic of the world. In a sense the repetition that is not repetition speaks of subliminal processing of information in which the work exists as a visual interrupt. This strategy is similar to agit-prop or psychedelic imagery twisted into a ‘viral’ and explosive density. The door of perception is carved out in re-viewing the limits of our processing.

KR July 21, 2010

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REFERENCE

Early precedents for my work can be seen as in the rich formal awkwardness of organization in medieval manuscripts that embellish indiscriminately throughout the picture plane. One individual, Hrabanus Maurus, a ninth century monk, invented a ciphering system for encrypted poems that interacted with imagery, that in turn had smaller poems within, making images that were incredibly complex and yet accessible as some degree to the largely illiterate.

In researching practitioners of this ‘horror vaccui’ (fear or likely conscious nullification of free space) type style present in diverse forms form tribal cultures to the ‘Geometric Period’ of Ancient Greece, I came upon some less known artists engaged in visual spiritualism or mediumistic artists in the early 20th century. Being what would later be labeled ’outsider artists’, largely untrained in various concepts like negative space and composition – they constructed extremely intricate patterns and filled endless amounts of space in ways that mirrored but moved beyond the beautiful yet generic meanderings of primitive art and object adornment. In 1908, Adolf Wolfli began a 25,000 page epic-object-epic defying categorization that featured 1,600 illustrations merged with texts and musical notation that in turn spewed a story of blended autobiography and fantasy. Artists like Wolfli and Augustin Lesage created massive projects in scale and scope that built into their own eccentricities and ran with them like a database of Mad Libs. Later in the century, similar strategies were adopted by the underground comix movement and psychedelic art and in the 70’s and 80’s artists like A.R. Penck and Keith Harring would use the same kind of ‘automatic’ embellishment to fill spaces with their own pictographic icons.

In traditional art history, ‘modern’ compositional strategies that came from using formal techniques of analytic cubism liberally manifested in what I believe to be the first truly American works by artists like Marsden Hartley - in a type of bricolage that disintegrated images as falling into categories of abstract/landscape/portrait/still life - and later a group of artists labeled the precisionists: Ralston Crawford, Stuart Davis, and Charles Demuth amongst the most notable.

Particularly Ralston Crawford in his proto-pop sensibility, tried to convey the complexity of the observed world into an equally complex visual hierarchy rather than the exuberant jazz like emotive compositions of peer Stuart Davis. He tended to favor a more industrial layout which did not create artificial balance but rather imperfection even within an industrial application. Demuth made striking visual compositions that seemed to borrow and string together from every application at that time (Italian Futurism, Orphism, etc…as well as being obsessed with Duchamp’s ‘Bride’ panting) but created something distilled, defined, and well..’pop’. On a side note, many of his paintings are known to have secret layered subject matter.

In Europe there was Kurt Schwitters, a German, who was rejected from the dada movement in Berlin as a member because of his educational background and ties to modern aesthetic movements which were looked on with disdain by intellectual radicals. Indeed after rejection he went on to emphasize radical visual experiments in the field of collage – that was currently being used in more obvious political ends by satirical geniuses like Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield. Yet Schwitters’ approach was to attempt a more comprehensive coherent sense out the world of cumulative fragments-turned-stories, Rather than using collage to juxtapose or illustrate already set ideas and fleeting politics. In addition to his flat work, Schwitters’ most ambitious projects were in his alterations of physical spaces, most notably the Merzbau, which reflected his formal ingenuities back into real physical spaces.

Influences in the later part of the century to the present are a little harder to isolate but in addition to Silver Age comics, science fiction, DIY poster design, and a few other things I’ve already listed there a few individuals of note.

Wallace Berman was an archetypal (or anti-archetypal) beatnik who was involved in the infamous Ferus gallery in California in the late 50’s and through his self published journal SEMINA (latin:seed). His own personal work comprised almost entirely of serial images done on verifax (copier) with the majority featuring a grid of repeated emblematic images of a hand holding a palm-sized transistor radio. The speaker was replaced by a variety of images –themselves iconic – that were then meant to string together to express various ideas (mostly arbitrary, surreal, groovy) which he added to by hand written notes and painted Kabbalistic Hebrew characters.

- Roy Lichtenstein - here is where I will admit my admiration of 'uncool' Roy Lichtenstein

- Öyvind Fahlström

- Computer Chat and Summary.

WIP

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Ken D Resseger
Born 1981,
Kent County, Rhode Island, USA
Lives and works in New York City and Providence

Education
2004 Bachelor of Fine Arts, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
Summa Cum Laude

Group Exhibitions
2009 "i heart art" Benefit Exhibition, WORK, Brooklyn, NY
2008 "A P A R T T O G E T H E R", HP Garcia, New York, NY
2008 "Honor roll to the chariots of fire", Day One, Bridgeport, CN
curated by Scott Meyers
2007 "Not What But Where", HP Garcia, New York, NY
2007 "INADMISSABLE", HP Garcia, New York, NY,
curated by Dominique Nahas
2006 "Red Desert", Liz Heskin/Heskin Contemporary, New York, NY
2006 Pierogi Flat File

Awards/Grants
2004 Pratt Circle Award for Academic Excellence
2004 Fine Arts Award for outstanding merit in Painting
2001 Pratt Institute Grant, Brooklyn NY (through 2004)
2001 Presidential Scholarship Award, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY (through 2004)
1999 Centennial Scholarship: Full tuition Scholarship, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI