Artist Statement
Joshua Unikel
I was once told I can collaborate with a blueprint—a binding agent in a messy system of attempts—the melody a means of locating of. I was in the woods with the dog, and elsewhere was daybreak. So much space happened, a huge amount of space and all this walking—the woods, the woods past the dogwoods and back through how—walking through the woods and down by the stream, like being a series.
What if we try to find driftwood and deadfall, and if we find other collaborators away from the preciousness of color and concept? What if reflecting wraps itself in what is left—periodicals and book objects, art catalogs and ephemera, ink on paper?
I live in a city that is subtle and prone to slow extremes—traffic so dense that one must drive the landscape slowly. Seasons change in less obvious ways. The greens are a different kind of green and the tide is a slow, silvery image of itself. It’s a city agitated by balance, a quagmire of chance and unfinished plans, unfinished conversations and unfinished landscapes, so I collect acceptance for narratives, collect everything yet to be woven.
As an interlude added to 2-channel video, waypoints of delayed frames. Frame One: a cardboard box ready to become. Frame Two: chairs in our house but not to sit fully in. Frame Three: a home full of arrowheads, my little brother’s shoebox. It explains itself in implicit histories, like Sound Grammar in descriptive shifts. Like memory’s quick, edited together with the images of what if and walking and driftwood—a blueprint that moves in imbalance and still structure, story and loss.