Kristan Horton

One For Yourself

September 29 – November 25, 2012

Artist notes –

1: Over the course of an evening I am watching his face. He smiles, he relaxes, he shows disgust quickly, then laughs. There are so many things to keep track of. The next day I attempt to recall and I did not, as I had wished, see amalgams but instead discreet moments. There appears to be no use for the amalgamated image in recall.

Perhaps this is the reason I am making the amalgamated portrait. It is an image that does not exist for me internally.
2: They are not self portraits as much as self used for portraits.

3: I harboured the simple feeling of generating from nothing.

4: I'm following a pattern that evolves in practice. One thing leads another. Am I defined by patterns laid down by practice? Am I redeemed by consistency? (the self as a consistent pattern)

5: To set up a frame for investigation and then work toward exhaustion. 6: The promotion of variation as a consulate to the neurosis of self.

7: Ray Cummings, an early writer of science fiction, wrote in 1922, "Time... is what keeps everything from happening at once" to which the theoretical physicist John Wheeler (1911-2008) added: "Space is what prevents everything from happening to me!"

8: Collapsing time makes everything available for use.

9: Augustine ends up calling time a “distention” of the mind (Confessions 11.26) by which we simultaneously grasp the past in memory, the present by attention, and the future by expectation.

10: If there is such a thing as a resonating self; if, therefore, production bears its signature; if this can be relied upon... Production of variation from the same source.

1. More is less: Increasing aspects lead to a break in recognition.

   
   

2. To what end; the self as raw material? ..an account, an accumulation, an economy ...

   
   

3. In the shortest interval, an opportunity for creation.

One For Yourself brings together for the first time Horton’s newest body of work, a selection from his informally dubbed ‘Sligo Heads’ – portraits eponymously named after the city in Ireland where they were conceived. In them, he approaches the photographic portrait as it collides with digital manipulation and painterly process. Features are blurred, streaked, disfigured and exaggerated as though the subject is no longer fixed within the singular photographic moment but rather surfaces continually over time. At once disturbing and graphic, Horton's images remain irresistibly beautiful recalling precedents from Bacon to Duchamp-Villon. The exhibition complements the survey exhibition of Horton’s work being produced by the MacLaren Art Centre with whom SAAG will co-produce the most significant monograph to date of the artist’s work.

Kristan Horton studied fine art at the University of Guelph and the Ontario College of Art and Design. For the past decade he has shown his work widely in Canada and abroad. He has also had solo exhibitions at White Columns, New York, (2008) and The Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2007), among others, as well as being featured in a range of group exhibitions including those at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies, Annandale-on-Hudson; the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo; and the Power Plant, Toronto. He currently resides in Berlin.