Barry Kiperman

Region: Northeast

Website: http://www.barrykiperman.com

City / State: Boston, MA

These schematics explore the mute persistence of signs, logos, symbols and mundane forms that are so inexorably familiar and commonplace they have become part of our everyday visual vernacular. Of the symbols that appear in my work, the paragraph symbol, the weather symbol (warm front approaching), the mathematical and the architectural symbols are removed from their normal familiar context. They are no longer narrative or descriptive. They are part of a more poetic visual strategy.

One of the catalysts for these paintings came from an old red circular steel Coca-Cola sign. The sign was so clear and so forthright, so visually clean and established in its Egyptian-like iconography; the green Coke bottle with its umber liquid against a red field, the white Coca Cola logo emblazoned across the center.

These tabletop structures make one aware of the fact that this is a physical object, with the quality of “objecthood” that Heidegger describes as being imbued with “the thingness of the thing, the thing being of the thing.”