Armchair Traveler and the
Innocents Abroad or Until I Know the Pattern. Bucheon Gallery, San Francisco,
2007
The act of patterning is a method
employed by artists to transform a recognizable figure or ground into an
abstract field, thus creating a slippage between what we know and what we
perceive. Within this patterning there is insistence. One insists within the
subject matter to create a loose narrative quality that exceeds the tangible.
In the excess, an earnest relationship is created between artist and subject,
transcending the explicit and entering into the extra-ordinary. The notion of
insistence that these two artists utilize in their work can be looked at
through the prism of the oblique and phenomenological writings of Gertrude
Stein.
Stein regarded her writing as
"insistence" rather than repetition, citing her erstwhile teacher,
William James. James's argument in his The Principles of Psychology (1890) that one must think of the
identical recurrence of a fact in a fresh manner remarkably resembles Stein's
contention that "in expressing anything there can be no repetition because
the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each
time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is
alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis."
For this particular body of work,
one conceptual umbrella is used under which to work. All the pictures in this
series have taken their subject matter directly from mid twentieth century
National Geographic magazines. From these magazines, Hull has culled exotic
front cover images, and reduced them to minimalist color fields and graphite
gradations. He has also undertaken a project of removing key portions of
cartography, replacing them with abstract geometrical designs referencing flags
and minimalist tropes and then making heavily patterned conceptual drawings of
significant ecclesiastical or governmental buildings through researching
locations from the altered maps.Also utilizing the insistence of patterning in
a similar way to artist Dave Mcdermott, Hull suggests that patterning is as exotic
as banal, and that pattern becomes an indicator for the obtuse idea of the
ÔotherÕ
His imagery is carefully chosen to
reference the idea of the Ôarmchair travelerÕ for which National Geographic is
known. Through the transformation of these images, an implicit relationship is
created linking notions of colonialism, objectification of the ÔotherÕ and
Western manÕs enlightenment-age desire to understand and undertake the foreign
world.
New Jerusalem Cathedral, Moscow.
Graphite on Paper, 11x14in 2007
The Globe Theatre, England.
Graphite on Paper, 2007
St. Alexander Cathedral, Hankou
China. Graphite on Paper, 2007