My work is an experiment in both reality and [media*]tion, and at once a contemporary and historical rumination on who and what the who is within and without our changing ideas on the self. Painting without paint, using only magazine paper and glue, the concept and materials of my work are one in the same. They are a play in and on the definition of [media*] itself. Looking to Webster for that definition, or more precisely, its verb form to mediate, the definition is: To intervene between two or more disputants in order to bring about an agreement, a settlement, or a compromise. Yet the question with mediate, which from the Latin translates as to be in the middle is this: in the middle of what? Who or what are the disputants: space and time, subjects and objects, male and female, work and madness?
To paraphrase Foucault, ‘work is only different from madness because we believe in paradigms that separate concerted effort from random stimulations’. Distinctions between ‘the real’ and ‘the mediated’ fall to the same fate: these false binaries have all been collapsed. And in this collapse, my work, both conceptual and material, returns to the classic image of collaging, of sense (un)making, reality (de)construction: bits making wholes into bits again, questioning the whole/part distinction along with all the other binaries we’ve mentioned. That being said, when work looks like madhouse paper piecemeal, when it is pieces redistributed, reconfigured and in turn rebutted, is it work? Or is it Foucault’s absence of work, a collapse in distinctions between rationality and schizophrenia, a false circulation between subject and object, reality and illness, and a they and me that is never resolved. And cannot be.
Nikki Moore is a recent graduate of the S.M.Arch.S program in Theory, History and Criticism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, (MIT). She was one of three to receive this year’s S.M.Arch.S prize for outstanding thesis work, and now lives in Austin, Texas. She is also the co-author of a book published this month by Xavier Barrall for the Paris Museum Collection, entitled “Varini at 18 Rue Bourdelle” on the work of Felice Varini.