Deus ex Machina
By Tom Wachunas
“It's instinctive in a certain kind of
painting...It's like a nervous system. It's not described, it's happening. The
feeling is going on with the task. The line is the feeling, from a soft thing,
a dreamy thing, to something hard, something arid, something lonely, something
ending, something beginning.” - Cy
Twombly
“Where is the wise man? Where is the
scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the
wisdom of the world?” - 1
Corinthians 1:20
UPCOMING EXHIBIT: The 77th Annual May Show, at
The Little Art Gallery THROUGH JUNE 1, 2019, located in the North Canton Public
Library, 185 N Main St, North Canton, OH / OPENING
RECEPTION SUNDAY APRIL 28, 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.; awards presented at 6 p.m.
A blessing and a
bane. A tool and a torment. A world and
a wasteland. The Internet. The cloud. The web. What have we wrought?
The complexities of
dichotomy, irony, and the arrogance of algorithms were very much on my mind
when I made my most recent piece, a sculpture which, I’m pleased to report, was accepted
into the upcoming May Show at The Little Art Gallery in North Canton. I named
the work Deus ex Machina (Latin for God from a machine). Here’s a definition
of the phrase from Merriam-Webster: 1 - a god introduced by means of a crane in
ancient Greek and Roman drama to decide the final outcome. 2 - a person or
thing (as in fiction or drama) that appears or is introduced suddenly and
unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble
difficulty.
After removing the
outer skin of a desktop computer tower to reveal its guts, I painted this
complicated box flat white (an architectural cloud?) and activated every square
inch of surface with gestures in graphite. The imposed scribbles, smudges,
symbols, and scripts constitute a calligraphy of sense and nonsense, truth and
fiction. A 3D essay on confounding dualities.
My intent is not to
posit answers so much as to raise questions. So what indeed have we wrought? A
treasure chest of incalculable riches, or a Pandora’s box of unspeakable ills?
Digital Deity. The
god of our age.
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