Richard Aldrich

January 18 mon - February 21 sun 2010

Opening reception : January 18 18:00 - 20:00

poem line (one kind of sleight of hand turns into another, with effusive energy sa sa sa sa sa). this is the first line of a poem, it is in a painting, a poetry book, a word file and a catalog essay. it is from this french…..(variety show type thing that is from an extra for robert bresson’s pickpocket) it is about this process of transforming or becoming. but more specifically about such a thing seeming to exist a certain way and changing into something but actually being something else and changing into an all new thing.

I had this dungeons and dragons “oriental adventures” book that aimed to put Japanese history into the realm of dungeons and dragons, and by this I mean, ninjas, samurais, and the like… which had been pretty popular in movies so, they figure, “lets try it in D&D!”but I really liked it. and this image in particular of the katana and the wakisashi, and the notion of the honor involved in two swords, two man made objects that would contain such emotional and intellectual ideas. so I was in the middle of America with this “culture” lifted up and taken from far away and plunked down into this fantasy realm. then I took this D&D culture, and it’s nostalgia for me, and my interest in role playing games as being, at root, objective philosophy– making rules to try to explain how things happen, and I put it into a painting, another object, and now this object is going back to the original world. an item moves all throughout realms, it stays the same materially, but reflects new lights as it is filtered through universes/realities. I like this painting to be a sign, a beacon for these small abstract ones. they too change, or don’t exist how they seem to at first. time is so different, and it changes, and we see things differently, or we make things differently, and this: the seeing as new, seeing things as something different, or this gauge that is different. it is important to see how things may have changed, how meaning changes so much in a new time or space; culture and how we see it and think of it and reflect on it..

A big thing, I had my first public asthma attack as we played dungeons and dragons one night. for me it was nothing new… my bronchial tubes tightened, I couldn’t breath, I grabbed my inhaler which I carried with me at all times (though don’t anymore) and had a couple puffs and all was fine. I remember my friends were really freaked out, even scared… I said, “don’t worry I am fine” this is when, at ten years of age, I first realized this disjuncture between my own and others perception of reality.