Visiting Artist: Lance Winn

Lance Winn discussed “paint as ectoplasm.” Methods of Pollock and Johns were a natural result of the development of painting, where making things occurred through the development of a natural system. Releasing control of the outcome in part to the medium also theoretically frees the mind from addressing things already known in order to work on other levels of cognition.
Winn brings up the question “Can a discreet object communicate in this digital age?” Questioning if evidence of the “generative process” is getting lost by technological execution or if process is of any importance anymore, Winn presents examples of his own work where the objects specifically contain evidence of their making. There is his lawn ornament of the Buddhist monk immolating in protest, where a 2D newspaper photo was enlarged and projected onto a 3D object of the same shape -the pixelized image was only clear from a single angle, speaking directly to the origin of the image in print and the process of the sculpture’s making. A simpler example is found with his drawing of a rain cloud, where the particles of pencil falling from the act of drawing a cloud on a vertical surface created the vertical marks of rainfall below – half the drawing made itself.
The “generative process” is most often multi-layered and each function is important. In his Atomic Clock, Winn revitalizes Rauschenburg’s combine with carefully hand-painted lines. In place of Screen-prints of printed images, Winn used specific control of brush weight to illustrate an atomic mushroom cloud. Color-separated paintings on separate plexi circles rotate on their center like clock hands. At the top of the hour the plates align to present the full-color image.
While Winn also addressed the use of multiples and commodification of tragedy, the thoughts he shared on “generative process” made the strongest impression on me. Ideas must undergo their making in order to be physically understood, and the process of making identifies the nature of an idea’s outcome. “Generative process” has intrinsic influence on artwork. Whether or not ‘making’ is detectable in a work, it has vital impact.

Lance Winn's Atomic Clockhttp://www.udel.edu/art/winn/atomic_clock.html