Bella Bosi
Patternicity, Poetry & Paraphernalia, 2022
Installation of Objects, C-Type Photographs on Fuji Matt paper, Artist’s Book, Audio, Animated GIF and 8 Videos (looped)
Dimensions of objects varied, Prints 59 x 84 cm
PATTERNICITY: Klaus Conrad in 1958, defined it as the tendency to perceive meaningful connections/patterns between unrelated/meaningless things.
As a digital, photographer and visual artist, I work intimately subverting standardised philosophies centred around subject-object dichotomies.
‘Patternicity, Poetry & Paraphernalia’ derived from a discomfort within my physical and mental environment, overly stimulated by thoughts and material things that encompassed me, I found myself attempting to order an anxiety without relief or resolution. There was a tension between initial impression of randomness and subsequent impulse towards a stratification of found objects. Therapising myself, I turned to Gestaltian psychology as a methodology, focusing more on process than content, where the immediate experience of the patient is the primary focus. With an awareness of phenomenological perspectives, the objective is to explore the patient’s obsessional pathways pending between idea and ideation.
Creating a collection of domestic paraphernalia and in pairing numerous Things from the home with semiotics, I formed reimagined art objects apart from their original advertised form and purpose. Utilising pattern cognition alongside an Intermedia-based ideology and Fluxus experimentalism, the objects as narrative presentations are sensual visual poems. Each poem is given a particular agency, infusing personalised patterns and perception with meaning and intention.
The monotonous audio-visual elements appear self-willed, imbued with technological automation, antagonising such feelings of cognitive overload. Each object, data article is suspended in the process of Meaning-making, aided by Conceptual Writing and enlivened with familiar, anthropomorphic, nondescript streams of speech synthesis. The work is a consequence of a type of Patternicity, an acceptance of a tendency that is “nothing but the anxiety driven, by-product of high task uncertainty” (John H Evans, 2006).
‘a camper’s candling insomnia’ follows a caffeinated, jittery narrator situated at his camp base. Through his one-sided coffee and candle innuendos, he engages in conversation and attempts to assist a fugitive on the run.
‘coming in static’ shares a mic-on, mic-off dialogue over amateur radio between two policemen, Sarge and Inspector. Using Metropolitan Police jargon and acronyms - the two come to terms with a difficult break-up, after Inspector has had an affair with a woman.
‘sunny side lobotomy’, a patient psycho-surgically dissects the ingredients and assets of an egg and a bulb through conceptual poetry and analysis. With an inclination to Dali’s Paranoic Critical Method, she proceeds to recite her comparisons, until her mind filters out into chaotic drivel.