Artist Statement
Art refers to a sequence of events that starts and ends visually, in some tangible form, and passes through language between. The initial impulse is often a response to some restriction: an outwardly imposed bounding region in the form of illness, poverty, or isolation are common sources. Experiences of this type draw forth an inwardness and attentiveness to physical states, the consequence of which is the backgrounding of verbal language in favor of a more physical, instinctive method. The expression of this is what is called talent, intuition, or some sense of internal vision. In some physical form, a person tries to capture and characterize his or her individual situation, mimicking signals from the environment.
As work matures, the characteristics of language are imposed: pattern finding and generalization take place. On output, statements of results which take a physical form, acting on perception and speaking to experience, are referred to as art.
In this sequence of events, statements may find expression in other forms, language-oriented or otherwise, and output may be produced at different stages, resulting in different types of work. Underlying these shifts is the personality in question. The same strengths and limitations emerge, independent of the characteristics of the individual settings. This invariant structure is what is being explored. In whichever form it happens to take, in whichever activity time is spent, the underlying thoughts make themselves known, and this is presented as the body of work of the artist.
-David Sarma, 2013
Creative Statement
In creative work, my primary area of interest is in the experience of perception and language-formation. My prior efforts have been directed towards establishing the basis for a visual language to characterize experience that varies both spatially and temporally; this effort was given expression in the piece 'Invariance'. The current output formats of design work, drawings, dance, and photographic images, are means of creating different levels of hierarchy to build out the structure of this language, as well as testing its validity as a means to capture and explore experience.
A subset of language-formation which is a particular area of interest is the characterization of intuition, guessing, and learning from experience. The fields of machine learning and inverse problems — along with associated probabilistic tools and geometric constructions — provide useful strategies and formal notions to guide direction of study.
I am interested in physical characterizations of terminology typically used in creative work, restating the terminology as physical motion, in the creation and traversal of a hierarchy. This unpacking of language into a uniform physical space gives the basis for utilizing in more abstract settings the same intuition and perception-based approaches developed in physical activities, such as drawing and dancing. Conversely, in artistic activities, I am interested in combinatorial play, the construction of a grammar or algebra over the basis elements of perception: edges, gradients, color combinations, gestures, and their higher-order groupings as faces, patterns of expression, and arcs of motion.
The utility of this effort comes through in commercial work in fluency with images, and the capacity to move quickly and easily between words and images to provide clear and succinct messages. The primary result here is the refined sense for visual story-telling. Bringing the computational ability and manipulations of sparse linguistic operations to bear on denser image spaces yields a fast, combinatorial style of art manipulation. The outcome is standardization in exploring intuition, giving a fast path to correct results, or their correlates in perceptual spaces: interesting and attractive images.
-David Sarma, 2013
