Johannes Porsch - Tropology

In installations, sculptural settings, and spatial interventions, as well as publications and exhibition displays, he undertakes semantic shifts or highlights existing ambiguities in order to use them as design elements in exhibition and publication contexts. Porsch reflects on underlying methodology, engaging with the techniques of artistic depiction or with reproduction and representation processes that are not unique to creating art but can also be found in broader social contexts.
    “The concept of artistic research allows me to redefine my own working methods on an ongoing basis,” says the artist of his self-reflexive field of endeavor, in which he continually analyzes and reviews his own strategies for producing meaning and generating reality. “Rather than analyzing the concept itself, however, I invoke historical and contemporary artistic positions through a frame of reference that I deal with in my artistic and curatorial practice as well as in my activities as an author. Science is not the paradigm I apply. Artistic research includes instead a certain amount of ambivalence, which can only be clarified through the process of artistic production, meaning the act of creating itself.”
    For Kunstraum Lakeside, Porsch is continuing research whose results he first exhibited in 2017 at the Kunstpavilion Innsbruck under the title “Tropology”. Tropes are linguistic devices that are used not in their actual sense but figuratively, thus corresponding with Porsch’s methods of shifting and subverting meanings. What is expressed through tropes is therefore not to be understood literally but rather in divergence from a set direction or a given path. Tropes are forms of unreality. In their constant twists and turns and changes of direction, by replacing one frame of reference with another, tropes evade clear semantic determination and undermine normative patterns and hegemonies.

Johannes Porsch (b. 1970 in Austria) lives and works in Vienna.



Captions
Johannes Porsch, Tropology, 2018
Courtesy of the artist