St. Mary's Projects in Studio Art:

Michael Bargamian / SMP 2013

I Inherit All Blood Sacrifices

As communicative beings we look to the written word as a way to guide and help shape our day-to-day lives. Words and written ideas tell us what is happening in the world around us, how we should act and what we need to believe in. To this extent the words that we read in newspapers and online forums always act as the signifier for a larger idea – we might read words that tell us about the latest celebrity gossip and we then immediately picture that celebrity in our mind. Words are controlling us constantly and we often become dependent on this manipulation in order to function in our modern world.

My paintings address our “dependency” on written texts and the symbols that they infer. The words or word-like marks that I make become the final point of “information” for a viewer to contemplate. Rather than have the viewer think about a distant subject or specific emotion, my statements act as a catalyst for outside thoughts that the objects or marks my not normally signify.