Johannes VanDerBeek

Artist Statement

In the most general sense the piece is structured around the constancy of imagery, information, and our elusive relationship to time as it moves between the past, present, and future. The form is an architectural ruin constructed from the format of the newspaper. Each structure is built from one single piece of newspaper and the information printed on the page is cut, folded, ripped, or spliced into three-dimensional collages that double as ruins of the original content. The columns of text become literal columns for the support of whimsical remnants such as colliding heads or babies hanging from trees that spread into a labyrinth of lyrical media for the viewer to navigate with their eye. Although the piece was made in 2008 and the information in the newspaper is from the recent past, it is made to look as though it is from the distant past. This transformation imagines that as information moves faster through our minds on a daily basis it causes an accelerated interpretation of the past to the degree that one week ago feels like a distant century.