Multifaceted viewing, Locke fuses fragments of sculpture, text, painting, and interactivity with notions of the gaze, resulting in a cohesive collection of locution.
...In the past, Locke portrayed the results of looking. In his single and group installations of portraits of men we look at them, they look at us, and at each other. In his version of the portrait, subjects aspire to be the objects of desire. In this desire-seeking network of looking we often leave ourselves behind. Locke’s new series of portraits liaise with the self-set pace of a tangential passage—the urge to look at, desire, lust after, and wonder about the other in a wandering state—creating the potentiality of intersections within the matrixes of glances, gazes, stares, suppositions, propositions and gestures—in the present.
How to present the gaze without objectifying it, redirect the prospect of narrative, or convey a message without having to reveal all of the details to the viewer? Locke’s new works mediate in pursuit of these questions. They burgeon on the edge of portraiture, installation and sculpture, evading categorization within a particular genre. Instead, Locke harmonizes modernist tropes with his own unique sensibility to the human form. Fragmenting both the titles of his works and the formal enterprise of portraiture, he presents glimpses of a lexical system of text, images and forms. He presents a mode of looking that is supported by Julia Kristeva’s “notion of intertextuality” which “replaces that of intersubjectivity;” where the tangential force of Locke’s new works shift to “occupy the status of mediator, linking structural models to cultural (historical) environment.” This notion of looking from a space of intertextuality evokes an unstructured, exteriorizing and evasive non-objective gaze that has the potentiality of being momentarily steadied amongst the tangential scatter within which Locke’s works function....
