What's Your Concept?

Comments from a curator: What's your concept? How's the subject tie into the technique, the technique into the subject matter? What does the viewer take away from the image (why is it more than just a pretty or clever picture)?

These are valid questions in the making of the work and in what seems to have become the expected post-creation speak about the work, but ultimately a strong image should stand alone without explanation.

I would not say the viewer has to take away an exact intention from the artist; it's more fluid. I'm often amazed at what engages, at what viewers pick up from images, intended or not. Hopefully, the image draws the viewer in and from there engenders inspection, reaction, thought, feelings, dialogue. Hopefully, it's layered. Hopefully, they walk way remembering it, mulling it over, then and days, months later. Hopefully, they feel the need to see the image again, and again, and it reveals more each time.

Not an exact message, unless it's astoundingly succinct and resonant. Most efforts at exact messages are flat and hollow. I don't believe the curator was suggesting an exact message to be intended and communicated, but rather something more universal and concrete than the individual experiences of the maker, or something that is pushed and honed to the point of becoming universal out of the individual (iconic). We target both: our individual perceptions frame what we see as universal, our beliefs about universal truths bias our perceptions.