The plan for a publication originated from a promising collaboration in 2006 that ended with my first rejection as an artist.
Not much later, I sought new partners for the publication — of which I at the time still assumed that it would become a simple book set up around pictures of handmade decors — again ending up empty-handed.
These first encounters with the professional art world made me think about the kind of relations I’d got into, relations which then for me seemed to have only two possible outcomes for the artist: repudiation or adulation.
In reaction, I invited friends and family to comment on the pictures of the decors, with the idea to include their responses in the publication. Their comments turned out to be very diverse, but in some of them, the use of language stood in the way of easy reading.
I hadn’t anticipated this problem, and it caused a discord: Should I keep my promise to publish their comments or should I break it, at risk of their disappointment? Neither outcome sounded very satisfactory. I started to re-read their comments, extracting themes, and taking notes along the way.
During my first reading, the language had attracted so much attention that I hadn’t had much of an eye for the richness of the content. But now I was delighted about what people had seen in the pictures.
I started creating a visual archive based on themes I had extracted from their comments.
This resulted in a grid of images in which each image is connected with the images that surround it thus creating one long complex network of associations that I could use as a framework for a play in and through which one tries to overcome the experience of rejection by the power of imagination.
Available at: https://frommetoyou.be/just-another-ray
