(BYRD ON PAINTINGS & TITLES…)

“Paintings and titles are both are organising principles. Both are ways of organising the world. One is a way of looking backward… Some of the naming moves the viewer forward, some of the naming is about controlling the way forward. We give things names to gain power over them/ Or by naming them we gain power over them.”

“Pictures are built to explore a language of marks or figures…”

“Titles…I catch phrases about the symptomatix of the present, the catch-cry relevant of the moment. Because of their fleetingness for me this is a way of bookmarking them”

“How we use language…..There is slippage and loss of sources in the internet…. a flattening of knowledge… silos”

“Something about misplacing our attention- they are carefully observed, rendered, visually built - combined into an image (portraits)…  Then you discharge /disregard the use of them as such (portraits) in the resulting image … There is a flipping and rippling in the image understanding as there is in the application of their seemingly random titles”

“They (the subjects) are taken from their original context to be deployed in the image frames but cannot be understood separated from their origins?”

“I could just take words and build things –but if I take FRAGMENTS – the  phrases carry the history with them. They carry their histories with them –as do the (seemingly random) subjects, and their pictorial found grounds- I fold them into one another, to create a new thing…”

“To be understood in its new combination… to create new semiotic associations, in the tradition of a post modern hybrid …. Seemingly dissonant…”