Todd Schroeder’s Statement for “Todd Schroeder Free” exhibition @ the William Busta Gallery, Sept 2011:
I try not to kill urge and impulse.
I like to tell myself that I don’t care about clarity.
I tend toward the sparse.
Anxiety, usually about the inevitable and the uncontrollable, prompts me to work.
I am a devotee of the fortuitous.
I often see my work as an aesthetic organizing of random thoughts. Arbitrary thoughts organized around an aesthetic position or place…
The engineering of paradox is paramount for me.
I look for solutions that seem simple. The carefully articulated done in a burst.
The notion of resonance is important to me. What seems to be following me around? If I can’t get it out of my head, or if it surprises me, takes me off guard, then it finds its way into the work.
I like puns and I like forms with multiple meanings; open-ended and incomplete arrangements.
Regarding the Stagger Lee work and beyond:
In a truly basic sense, 2 things came together: a song and a highway road sign.
The sign was along highway 40 going through the mountains in Tennessee. It was the kind of sign that can be pulled around behind a truck and moved from place to place. The words/word on the sign was CAUTION stacked 3 times high. The structure of the sign was of a grid. The letters were made using light bulbs lit up relative to the grid. I was not driving, my wife was, I had a little notebook and made a quick little drawing of the sign.
The song has its origins in the Delta blues; at least I think it does (maybe it goes back further?). The song is often titled something along the lines of “Stagger Lee”, though the spelling varies and so does the title (“Ballad of Stagger Lee”…). I had been listening to a version of the song that was recorded a few years ago by Nick Cave (of the Bad Seeds), a hugely powerful version, very sparse and intense. I was (and am) struck by how incredibly married form and content are in this version. Though at this point I wasn’t thinking about connecting it to my production at all, but I kept coming across different versions of this song in the most random places: hearing some R and B band play a live version in a cocktail lounge, listening to The Clash’s London Calling album for the 1st time in years and noticing the narrative with in another song…on and on. The song seemed to be pushing itself on me.
This evolved (way down the line of evolution) into a large wall drawing that I have done 2 times now. The structure is relative to music and to the construction of language. The language is relative to music and the narrative of the song. The form of the narrative migrates and changes, as does the formal arrangement of the music. Though there is a connective tissue to the entire history.
The painting, untitled (oh no there goes Tokyo), follows along that same logic, but connecting to a 1970’s Rock and Roll song by Blue Oyster Cult. It is about the connections between form and language, music and story.
