The human mind is a truly amazing phenomenon. It has the power to project and to construct absolute good, absolute evil, and all points between.
The human mind can follow a point, a path, a reference, a theme, sometimes a literal point, sometimes an inferred, sometimes even a non-existent point.
However, the human mind is also a trap, a net of thoughts, ideas, possibilities, of fears, angers, consequences. The mind is awash with 'things', whether real or imagined, but rarely does it have time for the opposite of 'things', of no-things.
This contextualising, exploring, defining of something and of nothing, is what interests the artist Monika Bancyr-de-Angeli in her latest project 'White', which for her is a purposeful playground of what is and isn't, of what could be, and what could not be, what has meaning, and what has lack of meaning.
Narratives, unless brutally tied down by the artist, are often ambiguous, often purposely so. It is always good to get the viewer to think, it is what so many artists strive to do. But it is also good to get the viewer to un-think, to deconstruct their absolutes, or the absolutes that their society, or their culture has given them, and that is always much harder than just getting people to think.
To un-think, to un-hitch possibilities and probabilities is what the human mind should be about, but so rarely is. To entertain in certainties, doesn't mean that you understand that world in certainties, it just means that you have projected some dodgy 'certainties' on a world that has no need for them, or doesn't have room for them. It is the flaw in human nature, and the human mind, to tie down the world around us, particulary when it has no need or reason to be tied down.
Monika plays with notions of the create and the un-create, of mixing the space of nothing, with the space of something, making all interchangeable, all the opposite of what they should be, what they could be, what they will never be.
This is an artist that understands the great secret of the universe, that there is nothing to understand, because everything is constantly in a state of flux, a state of change, where positions shift dynamically. Are you here, are you over there? Are you negative space, or positive? Are you neither?
To some, perhaps to many, this is a 'do your head in' type of conceptualisation. But it is important to ask these questions, and who better to ask them than an artist. We don't live in a world of certainties, we never did. We live in a world of infinite possibilities, some of those possibilities can become probabilities.
To shift and change, to play and be serious, to project cultural certainties and then see them as nothing, to foment noise and then silence, these and more are projected by Monika, as both artist and as thinker, and indeed non-thinker.
As an end note, Monika has prominently placed on her website, the William Burroughs quote "...Chaos smirks..." A really good one to remember, and a couple of words that fundamentally describes Monika's perspective on life, the universe, and everything.
All work is copyrighted to the artist. Please ask permission before sharing imagery. Thank you.
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