ABOUT RAWBURTZ / AN INCOMPLETE ACCOUNT
Observation
made physical.
RAWBURTZ began before I knew what to call it.
It is the accumulated result of watching, making, questioning, abandoning, rebuilding, overthinking, contradicting myself, and eventually realizing that those things were not preventing the work.
They were the work.
I make physical evidence of things that are difficult to hold still.
02 / BEFORE RAWBURTZ
THERE WAS NO
STRAIGHT LINE HERE.
Before the name became useful, I moved through different kinds of systems: technical, commercial, physical, visual, human. None of them were a rehearsal for becoming an artist. They changed what I learned to notice.
STRUCTURE
DRAFTING / ENGINEERING
Learning that even the thing that looks chaotic still has to negotiate with structure.
Drafting and engineering trained one kind of attention: tolerances, relationships, constraints, the consequences of moving one line. The work I make now is less interested in precision, but it never stopped thinking about structure.
03 / WHAT I KEEP SEEING
THE QUESTIONS
KEEP RETURNING.
I do not work from one answer. I keep returning to a set of tensions that change depending on where I am standing.
04 / THE PHYSICAL PART
THINKING IS NOT
THE FINISHED OBJECT.
Eventually something has to meet a surface. Material resists. A line thickens. Paint covers what seemed important five minutes earlier. The body gets a vote.
01 / SURFACE
I often know the surface before I know the painting.
Canvas, built material, texture, edge and resistance establish conditions before an image has decided what it wants to become.
05 / A WORKING MODEL OF A PERSON
ONE PERSON.
THREE POSITIONS.
This language emerged because one word for the self was not enough. Select a position.
SELF / EXPERIENCES
The raw position. The part that feels before the feeling has been translated into something socially useful, legible, polite, or safe.
SELF experiences. GHOZTY performs. THE WITNESS observes.
06 / THE WORK CHANGES WITH ME
AN ARCHIVE IS
A FORM OF MEMORY.
The useful part of an archive is not proving consistency. It is preserving enough evidence to see where the language changed, repeated itself, failed, or unexpectedly survived.
Making stopped being peripheral. The earliest recurring marks, pressures and visual instincts began accumulating before there was a clear system for understanding them.
07 / WHAT RAWBURTZ REFUSES
THE WORK DOES NOT
NEED TO BECOME
EASIER TO EXPLAIN.
COMPLEXITY WITHOUT PRETENSION.
OBSERVATION WITHOUT JUDGMENT.
CONTRADICTION WITHOUT EMBARRASSMENT.
ACCESSIBILITY WITHOUT SIMPLIFICATION.
EVOLUTION WITHOUT ERASING THE PREVIOUS VERSION.
THE WORK MAY CHANGE.
THE REASON FOR LOOKING SHOULD NOT.
08 / AN OBSERVATION FOR YOU
OBSERVATION / 001
Sometimes certainty is only an assumption that stopped being questioned.
09 / CONTINUE LOOKING
YOU KNOW ENOUGH
ABOUT ME.
What do you want to look at?
Or leave.
The work will still be here.