Ariel Taverner

Artist Catalogue

Virtual Exhibition

“Purposeful Prettiness:

Conversions of Chaos and Order. ”

With little attention paid to zeitgeists such as materiality, or a cohesive visual language, any and all projects endeavoured by The Artist (that’s me, hi) are pursued for two purposes: he thinks it’ll be pretty and it gives him a sense of Purpose.

The Artist made the decision to prioritise his own mental health by conceptually fusing the pursuit of purpose into his professional practice. It has been found that “…with a clinical diagnosis of Social Anxiety Disorder, on days where [one] commits significant effort towards their purpose in life, you see about a 20% drop in social anxiety symptoms the next day, a 20% drop in social comparisons, a 15 - 20% bump in self-esteem, and a 25% bump in their sense of meaning in life the next day’(Kashdan, T. 2017).

Purpose in hand, The Artist metaphorizes Chaos (Primordial, undifferentiated and raw potential) and Order (Primordial, differentiated and actualised potential) as conceptual states of abstract reality to be projected onto his raw materials. Converting the raw materials into art objects symbolizes the conversions from Chaos to Order or vice versa.

The Chaotic minerals and nutrients were Ordered into a tree. The tree was then plunged into Chaos by being felled. Those felled logs were once again reconverted into Ordered representations of Bonsai trees by the intervention of the Artist. The black ink drawings act as an Ordering of my subconscious mind whilst their curation converts them back into a Chaotic state. The Laser Cut Petal Poems have gone from flower on tree, to pressed flower, to glued flower, to laser cutting the pages and binding them back together. Each material conversion of the flowers is metaphorised by Chaos and Order converting and re-converting into each other and themselves.

It can be seen that all projects and manifestations of my work do not represent either Chaos or Order singularly, but rather the relationships of one state with the other in the act of moving through from one state into another. It is a dance between Chaos and Order, where shifting definitions, shifting states symbolize the physical energy shared and highlighted by the co-creation of dancing. How it is the act of dancing, artist with object or viewer with artwork, that defines the spectacle we deem worthy of attention. That we deem pretty.