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... the more we study man... the less we are in a position to know him
Rousseau
Peacocks, the superstitious tell us, are birds of ill omen; opals are gemstones of poor faith, worn on the path to deception, waywardness, untruth and eventual ruin. Art is stolen from lite, or at least from a continuity that it (art) rejects by stopping change and playing tricks of permanence. It excuses itself of the alterations it makes to 'reality' by laying claim to the truth of sensation. This is what the romantics believed, that there was some underlying essence in what was fleeting. But what of sensation? What is the method of its truth? For if art is said to find so much, the artistic method (as if it were separate) may yield the way to opening- whatever truth, any truth. Groves' exhibition was important for the way it attempted, and succeeded, in absorbing aspects of art's making into its aesthetic content. Formatted on a few levels, Groves used the notion that while the final or resolved product can never be properly separated from the pains that went into making it, ceasurae are immanent, even necessary. What is interesting is that they are less structured than arbitrary. The effect suddenly becomes wrenched from the cause so that we are forced to think of them separately in order to make sense of arts true nature, that is, a broad understanding of its genesis and the result. In short, the analysis of art is carried out by distantiating effect and cause so as to reach the topic of their inextricability.
During our visual experience of Groves' work, two poles of engendering and engendered are