23 Chunks of Being
by Gregory Grieves
October 12 - October 22, 2022
Reception: Friday, October 21st, 6-8PM
Gregory Price Grieve's retrospective is not just a collection of objects in this electric moment, as the physical atomizes into data and perception into pixels. Instead, it's an archive of a life understanding itself. The artist becomes a dungeon master, the viewer a willing player, and the artworks in "23 Chunks of Being" components in a game of embracing the groundlessness we navigate.
The Dungeon Master of Meanings
As a major contributor to the emerging study of religion and video games, Gregory Price Grieve, Head of the Religious Studies Department at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, researches and teaches Asian religions and popular culture. His retrospective of photo-collages, paintings, sculptures, videos, and installations spans almost forty years, with many shown together for the first time. His artistic expression explores the ideas connecting his research interests without having to resort to the fixed meanings required in academic language.
Grieve uses collage, assemblage, montage, and installation--techniques originally employed by the early 20th century avant-guard movements. The Dadaists, Surrealists, and early Conceptualists reinvented the role of artist with strategies to battle ossified institutions. Their materials and techniques could satirize social conventions, undermine the certainty of rationality, or embody the sensory and informational overload that was part of modernization. Similarly, Grieve uses found photographic images, many from the Library of Congress, and found objects, combining them to create a personal language. Their layering, superimposition, transparency, and montage unify his source materials with a new logic. The resulting aesthetic is one of free-associative flows, lucid dreaming, and humor with titles that play with etymology, imply conceptual readings, or make cross-disciplinary references to add an additional layer of interpretation.
While it’s easy to frame Grieve’s work within an art historical canon, his intentions to represent metaphysical phenomena have much in common with religious art. Shifting the rules of representation away from depiction, the artist’s game-like approach asks to be deciphered like an illuminated manuscript or sacred relic. Some of his interactive works address the viewer in a more theatrical way, while others are self-contained and oblivious of an outside world, employing a kind of visual absorption. Aesthetically, this vacillation between the two viewer relationships shares a lot with the logic of video games and virtual reality. Both artforms merge the instructive intent of the Medieval church with the spectacle of late-stage Capitalism. This new aesthetic unifies the traditional forms - sculpture in the form of 3D modeling, illustration, narrative arcs, and dynamic music – into something of an immersive digital phenomenon with the capacity to totalize a world view. The relationship of Grieve’s artwork with religion and interactive technology call to mind how visual art employs our projections in the act of making meaning through story. Whether it's fantasy, conspiracy, mythology or theory, the power of our imagination makes an ethereal world real.
In this electric moment, as the physical atomizes into data and perception into pixels, Grieve’s retrospective is not just a collection of objects. It’s an archive of a life understanding itself. The artist becomes a dungeon master, the viewer a willing player, and the artworks in ’23 Chunks of Being' components in a game of embracing the groundlessness we navigate.
Ryan Hill, Professor and Director of Sculpture Tucson
