Greg Pond
statement:
I am interested in American mythology and the related concepts of westward expansion, regeneration through violence, and cultural attitudes towards landscape. It is the landscape that largely influences our collective mythology and creates its narratives and heroes such as John Wayne and Daniel Boone. The effort to create the house upon the hill, an island utopia in the wilderness of the new world was the puritan project as well as that of its rival; Thomas Morton's Merry Mount. In this context the wilderness is seen as the place of the terrible unconscious and must necessarily be replaced by systems of order. The depths of this terrible unconscious is the pursuit of Conrad's Kurtz and Melville's Ahab. In the case on this current series of projects I am evaluating my own far tamer, and hardly dramatic, suburbanaized experience by this measure. Through compressing history and cultures, altering the pace of time, and distorting physical scale I seek to portray a psychological rather than a social or material realism.
I would also like to recall the last words of the poet John Keats: "I feel the flowers growing over me."
education:
The University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia Master of Fine Arts, June 1998
The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee Bachelor of Arts, Fine Arts and English, May 1995
exhibitions:
I’d Leave the Whole World Round
I Feel the Flowers Growing Over Me
Presence of Mind II
Switchyard
Trans-Locus Bandwidth
artist's website: