2 June - 3 July Vision River
I can see two of these language-like sequencers of images playing here. One that looks like a set of painterly abstractions while the other represents a reality that often includes pictures hanging on gallery walls. Of course the two sets of images mingle. We observe as an art-like image that evolved as a manipulation of pixels ends up on a gallery wall where it is observed as a manipulation of images.
It is a simple story but it is a complex consideration of the mysterious romance of art. It’s not a movie; there is no beginning, no end, no running time. Look at it for 20 seconds or look at it for an hour, you will see much the same thing. But with an hour's viewing the more nuanced this meditation on the romantic ideal of art becomes.
At the end of a parting email, Ho Bo Jo informed me that his name is a “3 word poem”, a kind of onomatopoeia perhaps, a name that describes as much as it identifies, unlike his images that identify rather than describe.
It isn’t his real name.
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More correctly, it wasn’t his name when I first came across him. But when real is divided into: what was, what is and what will be, it’s the present we pay attention to. Change is accommodated, necessitated even expected, but rarely questioned when a question could be read as impolite, ill informed and possibly reactionary.
Art has pummeled the idea of real. Words like, illusion and reality, origin and reproduction, concept and object, facsimile and symbol - have been thrown together often enough for people to realize that everything is real; however, some things are more precisely named than some other things. Reality has become a question of nomenclature.
Ho Bo Jo is exhibiting jpegs, objects from cyber space that effortlessly ship pictures around as numbers. For an artist digital imagery opens pictures to seemingly endless sequences of change that can be tracked. What might begin as a single idea can expand into a graphic record of its evolution. In time the narrative of evolution becomes more consequential than any single image suggesting that the narrative has morphed into an embryonic language, a Vision River perhaps. Look at one of Ho Bo Jo’s images and you will see a jpeg, look at a 100 and you will see a language.
I can see two of these language-like sequencers of images playing here. One that looks like a set of painterly abstractions while the other represents a reality that often includes pictures hanging on gallery walls. Of course the two sets of images mingle. We observe as an art-like image that evolved as a manipulation of pixels ends up on a gallery wall where it is observed as a manipulation of images.It is a simple story but it is a complex consideration of the mysterious romance of art. It’s not a movie; there is no beginning, no end, no running time. Look at it for 20 seconds or look at it for an hour, you will see much the same thing. But with an hour's viewing the more nuanced this meditation on the romantic ideal of art becomes.
At the end of a parting email, Ho Bo Jo informed me that his name is a “3 word poem”, a kind of onomatopoeia perhaps, a name that describes as much as it identifies, unlike his images that identify rather than describe.
Tony Twigg
