Maybe it Takes a Loud Noise

Artists

• Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen

Statement

In our work the process of translation is a constant, from language to image to object (and perhaps back again), from one intelligence to another. We are heavily influenced by both the texts we read and the structure of the book, making work that, in a broad sense, addresses the activities of reading and writing and the ways that we come to and through knowledge. The space between words and images is crucial, and we use it to explore the problematic processes of learning (in and out of an education), of labor (in and out of the art world), of conservation (in and out of the historical canon), and, most recently, of revolutionary politics (in and out of our living room).

In the past year, we have been caught up in the surges of parallel revolutions both intimate and remote. We watched our son take his first steps as Tahrir Square filled with people. These beginnings have focused our attentions on the future, on the shape of politics in our lives, and on a persistent set of problems: the widening divisions between ideologies and between incomes, the acceleration of time and the diminishing of public space, the blank hum of strategic media silence, and the possibility that so much protest might accomplish very little. These conditions are bracketed by questions of representation—and the circulation, ingestion, and veracity of all that we now call ‘information.’ Belief is partly an aesthetic process. We use the aesthetic objects we make as conduits for ideas. And, we look for them to in turn use us, showing us new ways to think, regard, and recognize where something like truth might be.