Artist's Statement

The work evolves out of an ongoing interest in the viewer's location and orientation in both the conceptual spaces invested as well as in the physical parameters of the work both in itself and as it relates to the site.

I use territorial metaphors derived from mapmaking extensively, at times in deliberately explicit ways. In my work, I have been examining how spatial, pictorial and textual languages can challenge existing constructs of reality as it can be perceived within current ideological frameworks. From my perspective as artist and producer, these frameworks include those articulated through accepted expectations of what defines art work -whatever the cultural idiom.

The work seeks to underline the viewer's ontological / ethical awareness of specific moment's existence, a moment of private reckoning at the time of viewing. I work with and out of the physical, emotive, ethical and intellectual territories both the viewer and I bring to the reading of work.. The work increasingly questions the nature and the conditions of experience : the methodologies and discourses specific to the processes of experiencing artwork in the here and now, and within the continuum of historical and a-historical memory.

Carla Whiteside, June 2000