“SOCIETY”

The place of the object in my work has manifested itself in many ways over the last few years.  Objects both organic and synthetic have largely informed my approach to painting and seeing the environment. These 3D symbols have become central to the narrative in this work, which is a bit less literal and more metaphoric.

With the ‘Society’ objects the cube itself becomes the nucleus of communities big and small, familiar and distant, local and foreign.  Out of this configuration the cut tree branches become representative of the members of various sectors of the social structure.  How the work finds itself physically positioned points to an uneven distribution of responsibility and burden in greater systems of living.

The pieces allow for changing configurations, which suggests the shifts in responsibility.  Visually this suggests the uneasiness of the minority supporting the majority.  It also makes soft references of labor equations like 20% of a workforce do 80% of the work.  The changes in governmental power occur over and over again which redistribute the stress of social, spiritual and emotional support.  The struggle of the responsible minority to ‘hold it together’ transcends the idea of title and classification and meets the pressing necessity of preservation.  The work presents itself as a metaphor for the precarious nature of modern society illustrated by visually cumbersome engineering and the observation of an unsettling reality.

John Cox

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