John Frame

It occasionally happens that words appear directly on the surfaces of my works. For much of the contemporary art world, words automatically trigger some degree of conceptual curiosity about their content. When words appear in my work, it is usually the case that I have “seen” them there, meaning that the word or words keep bubbling up into my consciousness in such a way that I cannot ignore them. Since, I prefer not to have them in the pieces, I resist including them until there seems to be no alternative solution to both the composition and the content. In “Godsbugs!” the word MATHIEU appears across the top. Even though I have no specific personal association with the word, it seemed intuitively correct both visually and at the level of content. If I imagine the piece without the word if feels incomplete. Because these events emerge during the process of working do not return to them later to ask “what they mean”. For me, their meaning becomes submerged in the feeling of the piece and they can no longer be directly connected to a literal interpretation.