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Written by Aleem Khan
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Thursday, 22 May 2008 |
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You can spend your whole life trying to achieve success only to realize you were doing it on other people’s terms. Only, when you are so completely exhausted from the utter dissatisfaction of achieving the unwanted, do you finally realize what it is YOU want.
It has taken me forty plus years to realize it, but I could no more stop making art than I could stop breathing. I have degrees in Environmental Studies, Political Science, and Architecture and yet, no matter how much I resist it, I still come back to art. Nothing else I have ever done is comparable to the spiritual growth and rapture I experience when creating art. It has been the greatest privilege of my life and it’s the only thing that makes sense anymore.
Please give generously or this could happen to you or someone you love. Help stop art… before art stops you.
My work is a discourse on the subjectivity of ideas. The juxtaposition of order and random events is my way of alluding to our habit as human beings to try and give order to the random universe we live in. We are constantly creating structure, ideology, philosophy, religion, laws, etc. and holding them up as self evident truths and guiding principles to our lives. These ideas give our lives meaning, order our societies, direct us in our daily lives and help guide us in times of need.
But what happens when competing ideologies meet? How do these ideologies condition us for the acceptance of conflicting philosophies? In many cases they do not prepare us at all. In fact, they often require us to believe in them unquestioningly and completely and this can lead to a state of conflict in light of foreign ideas.
The very fact that competing ideologies exists might be taken as evidence that some or none of them are self evident. It is my belief that ideas are a product of our imagination and we are, in large part, a product of our surroundings. My work is an attempt to demonstrate, through metaphor, how we create ideas and order our world.
I begin by creating a random set of events through the interaction of color, consistency, and stroke. This represents the natural world undistorted by ideas. I then single out individual elements and highlight them, superimpose ordering elements such as grids, and create connections between similar areas to create a composition that is in tension. The order struggles to contain and tame the random elements in the same way we, as a species, struggle to maintain our ideologies and stave off the thought that we are simply random beings drifting through a random existence with out purpose or direction.
It is not my intention to tear down order, but to reveal belief systems for what they are. Ideology is simply our attempt to give our lives meaning. I would like our species to recognize the constructed nature of our belief systems and temper them with an air of relativism so that when competing ideologies do meet, they struggle to understand one and other rather than maintain a system of denial and conflict.
Aleem Khan has been a member of Outworks Gallery for 4 years. He is a self taught artist with a diverse practice that includes painting, sculpting, photography and graphic design. He has had two solo exhibits FINLAY KHAN 2007 and BAD BOYS BAD GIRLS EXPLORING THE LIMITS OF LIBERALISM 2006 and has been in many group shows including TAKE THIS YOU! curated by Cliff Eyland.
"I’m a relativist and liberal democrat and my work is often a commentary on political or religious inequities as I see it. Truth, as we know it, is series of contrivances designed to pacify and organize our fear of the unknown."
Khan's work can be seen in numerous restaurants and salons throughout Winnipeg as well as at the Winnipeg Art Gallery Art Rental and Sales.
Bachelor of Environmental Design (Architecture), University of Manitoba, 1998
Bachelor of Political Science, University of Winnipeg, 1996
Bachelor of Environmental Studies, University of Winnipeg, 1993 |
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