evil ducky with explanation

Rewrote the whole thing so it's easier to understand

About Evil Ducky


Read that Duchamp's urinal was the greatest work of the 20th century,
I wondered about people for whom a urinal represents the highest
cultural value of our time; the world could be more than just
something to piss at.

Proust writes that he doesn't need to go out to sea; a bit of canvas
and a small rope from a ship still smelling of salt spray, these were
all he needed to imagine himself on a ship; to him that was as real
as being there. But then Jung replies that having the flu is quite
different than hearing about it, that lived experience trumps
intellectual knowledge.

In any case, the world is too wondrous, strange, unpredictable and
magical for an intellectual explanation to suffice. That's where
Evil Ducky comes in.

It's about the joy of fun, lust, love, color, music, spices, plam
trees, balmy days in August as well as hurricane typhoons, avian flu
or loss and sorrow and getting on with life. Evil Ducky's meant as a
much needed transfusion of vitality to the monotonous
misunderstanding of the role of theory and concept in art practice.

Art is more psychology than math. The intellect is a mental faculty
but other psychic functions such as feelings, sensations, and
intuition contribute to the living process of experience; to deny
them is an arrogance than invites a repetition of the known, in other
words boredom.

Conceptually, Evil Ducky validates fun as a serious subject for art.
These images function as visual language by deploying themes
such as the ambiguity of mixed signals,
the dualistic nature of communication,
and the layers of meaning beneath the superficial.

Evil Ducky is a journey with a vengeance,
an exploration of the creative process
somewhat different from contemporary theory-driven practice
where an idea is later illustrated by a work of art.

This series started with vague feelings and intuitive effort,
without preconceptions of the finished work, what it would look like,
what it would mean, nor how it would fit into the current cultural dialogue.
Instead, the work explores processes of fascination and transcendence, (1)
controversial topics in contemporary art.

This work is based on a premise that solutions to insoluble problems
hide where no one's going to look; that once a system becomes rigid
it can only be revitalised by incorporating its opposite; that
discoveries occur
in those places judged worthless within the current paradigm.

Evil Ducky is classic 1950's photography,
altered by a strategy of disturbance and restatement,
personal iconography and urban narrative.

A theatre of objects at the micro level,
a stage for those antropomorphic projections
that occur with a change of scale.

The surface comedy is based in language interpretation,
in reading of context, of text in an image,
how what we see is altered by what we're told about it.
_________________________________________________________

1- Fascination is a mental state, a psychological process. As
biology it means synapses firing a programmed stimulus altering
consciousness in the face of transcendant factors.

Transcendence is the transitional state of an enlargement of consciousness,
the moment when reaching a higher understanding.
–

Miklos Legrady
310 Bathurst st.
Toronto ON.
M5T 2S3
416-203-1846
647-292-1846
http://www.mikidot.com