Shapes from the Bone Change

JOHN STURGEON

Shapes from the Bone Change

Sturgeon opens with a series of ritual body gestures, signaling with primal shapes, the square and triangle, as wind sounds whistle. There is a shamanistic quality to the mirrored image of structuring & reassembling patterns of bone fragments. By using sticks as diviners, he circles in a centering process to a squaring entrapment of the bone essence. Swimming amid bone symbols the tape evokes a haunting mixture of primitive alchemy and the magic of the electronic image.

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At first glance John Sturgeon's videotapes and performances seem like passages of prose written in a foreign language and in this liberating state one is free to interpret and imagine all sorts of meanings. It appears as though the artist has set out to invent his own metaphorical ontology in the spirit of Alfred Jarry's pataphysics.

However, John Sturgeon has been steadily accumulating an inventory of iconographic images associated with dream symbology, semeiology and a wide variety of literary notions concerning self-definition. In these images the artist is concerned with the quality of the gesture made by line, painterly surface, and meter of the art.

Peter Goulds, LA Louver 1977

Video: https://vimeo.com/38518017

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JOHN STURGEON

My tapes germinate from experiences, visions and dreams; expanding in a gestation process where ideas are manipulated as notations, drawings and hieroglyphs. I view my work as poetic, as a synthesis of drawings, painting, and sculptural concerns, as well as sound and time compositions. The intent is to distill the creative process into concise metaphors, which convey the initial power and energy of the psychic experiences. The structure attempts to suspend the viewer's conscious act of intellectualization and place him in a state conducive to direct experience. Each video traces an expansion of my boundaries, electromagnetic diagrams of self, a continual probing and documenting with the video eye, the video ear, the whirling texture of being.

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Artist's Catalogue Statement

Southland Video Anthology, 1976

Long Beach Museum of Art

the Trilogy:

While made independently Shapes from the Bone Change (1975), the Two of Triangles (1975) and Conjunct (1976) can be viewed as a trilogy of works that outline and explore the identification of the anima, or female element, in the male psyche. It is about the rebirth of the unconscious.

In many ways the Trilogy is the least complicated of Sturgeon's works, in that it contains the most readily understandable narrative. Yet the work draws from the experiences of making video in ways that defy the purely narrative discourse of plot, setting and characterization. Rather than describing a story, closely edited full-faced portraits integrate the various aspects of the drama into a connected succession of happenings.

Peter Goulds

L.A. Louver Gallery

1978