DECLARE: John Stevens
What does it mean to be contemporary? We asked all eleven of the artists in the show to give us their thoughts, collected in our DECLARE blog series.
Stevens' work hijacks a modernist vocabulary to explore the postmodern subject as a visual body within the panoptic and indexical systems of our spectral society. Through photography and traditional media Stevens explores his own identity and the nebulous afflictions it suffers under the dynamic and alienating influences of contemporary society. When asked what contemporary meant to him, he responded:
"The contemporary is a presence, my own as well as all others, in the dynamic plenum of existence undulating across space and time. My contemporary is an unfolding of history which I am entirely devoted to taking hold of, making my own, and reveling in the shared pleasure of. Contemporary is the Now before it is masked by the labor of progress and jailed as the object of history, poetry before the analysis: the ink still wet on the page. The contemporary is a struggle with fleeting glimpses of direction and purpose, swimming, sinking, floating in a river of becoming."
