scrapworm ∞ sean wrenn

scrapworm@earthlink.net > download cv

I work with a pseudonym as a process based, metaphoric identity. I have been creating and exhibiting as scrapworm since August of 2001. This identity is but a human perspective on presenting ideas and allows me to figuratively identify with collective entanglement. We are all really scrapworms, winding paths through the life fueling collective composts of time, thought, matter, space, society, culture -- and the web-expanding metaphorical implications of such concepts.

As scrapworm, I am working within the concept that I (and generally, observably, we) survive days by perceptively synthesizing images, and forms of existing - searching for something that is actually indefinable. We collect parts of the overwhelming sensory intellectual experience of external reality based on their uniquely personal aspects. As we perceptively meander routes through such mental accumulations, we each process and create uniquely new things. As I wind an individual path, I consider examples from the world document (of which I experience the landscapes, societies, and artifacts) as scrap fragments that I find either ironic in coexistence, beautiful in balance, sad in calm emptiness, terrifying in violent inundation, and/or (especially in found print materials) absurdly propagandized. I associatively express my impressions of interrelationships through collage and assemblage as remnant combination installations (filtered by my sense of reality and time). I work with objects and space as ‘topographies’ built through scale-mixing  and archetypal shape variations. My sense of transience motivates time-based explorations; I use photography and video for documentation, source material, and presentation. My art making reflects my philosophical concerns and the information age in history as suspended metaphoric mapping.

I question how the saturation of reproducible imagery affects perception. I explore what image capture and recording can mean, both personally and culturally, as it has been (and will further be) integrated into mass perspective with the technocratic escalation of history. My projects imagine future wastelands of the ‘American Dream’ that foreshadow themselves by investigating subtle determinants. As timeless and/or reflectively time-folding archives, the spaces explore media, information, and visual culture as socio- psychological meta-language and ethno-archeological artifact.

While I find 'the world' tragic in innumerable ways, I'm primarily bothered by the layers of intellectualized separation that let us accept photographic images of death and violent suffering as but the sad way of the world. Yet, images of deep space remain unfathomable remote truths! I challenge myself in a daily life of nurturing ideas and creating sculptural ways to express insights of interconnected dynamics within three-dimensional space, over time. I do so within the deep time evolution of human potential and an ominous apocalyptic atmosphere. 'Apocalypse' is but a collective idea grown from the fear of losing self and power. I make art situations that creatively manifest such potentially true visions, offering artifact maps toward potential transformations instead.

 

Bibliography

Bushwick Biennial Catalogue, by scrapworm Boswijk, Town of the Woods: Life in the Borderlands NURTUREart, June 2009.

Bushwick Biennial Catalogue, by Ben Evans Introceptual Ghostland NURTUREart, June 2009.

Brooklyn Rail Brooklyn Dispatches Bushwick Biennial: Venice It Ain't by James Kalm

Bushwick Biennial Catalogue,Boswijk, Town of the Woods: Life in the Borderlands NURTUREart, June 2009.

Resolve 40, Testing the Physical Limits, Copying and Collage. By Mark Stone, February 2005.

Catalogues for Genius and Madness, History and Identity, PrimoPiano LivinGallery, Lecce, Italy, 2006.

Artworld Digest, Seed Issue, 2007, p. 39.

Baltimore Examiner War gets the artists' touch by Jessica Novak, Jul 14, 2007.

Baltimore Sun, Artscape show has creative appetites by Glenn McNatt, July 15 2007.

Baltimore Sun Saying their piece about fighters, war: Artists' expressions of conflict aren't presented in the exhibit as black or white by Glenn McNatt, July 25, 2007.

SprayGraphic Artist Interview, www.sprayblog.net Matt Krise and Chuck B, August 2007.

 

Registries/Communities

Irving Sandler Artists' File
Artslant
ArtDoxa
Art Process
www.myartspace.com, search scrapworm
Saatchi, Your Gallery,
NURTUREart, 910 Grand St., Ground Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11211

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