Jon Kuzmich

Finite System #3: Blue in Green, Acrylic Paint on Komatex (Foamed PVC), 6 panels, 16.5" x 54.75"

As we learned during the course of this class, energy has many meanings in our culture and can take on many forms. In order to avoid getting completely overwhelmed with the many options one could take, I chose to focus on energy as a force of distortion. As an artist, I create visual systems that act as a metaphor for the fact that our perception as human beings is altered and distorted by our belief in systems that we create. By virtue of this distortion, systems (religious, scientific, political, etc.) change our relationship to the world, manipulate our conception of reality and influence our relationship to the cosmos. In essence, our belief systems keep us confined within a synthetic, human-created world. Therefore, even though I utilize the tools of abstraction and Op-art, I consider my work to be representational because the systems I create alter the perception of the viewer and imply that what we see and what we know are questionable.

The final work I created for this class, entitled Finite System #3: Blue in Green, uses the “energy” of thousands of very tiny blue and yellow dots to trick the eye/brain into believing it is seeing green. Additionally, energy undergoes many transmutations of form and the pattern in this work refers to itself on many levels: the overall work is composed of a pattern that is built by many permutations of itself on a smaller scale. Lastly, the work is an homage to gradients created by gravity: the mightiest form of energy at the cosmological scale.