Thesis Writing and Installation in the Church

There is positive news on the thesis front.  John has given the go ahead to start writing the thesis--YAY!  After three versions of the outline, and with John's expert guidance, I had one of those "ah-ah" moments when I figured out how structure the writing around the images to create a meaningful narrative-- not just a boring research report.  The outline is at least a workable one, and so now the writing begins.

It has taken me a month to get to this moment.  It has helped to spatially lay out the images and relevant words/text next to each image, and then I could start constructing a visual narrative that made sense to me. All the elements were moveable, so endless variations ensued.  In the end, the spatial/visual model was what worked for me.

On a parallel plane of action, I was able lay out the visuals/text in a wonderful church-turned-gallery next door to my house.  Below I have included images of the building and the gallery where I am working on my thesis.  I feel very blessed to be using this wonderful space.  And it is possible that my husband and I will be buying the building sometime this fall/spring!  I have needed a larger studio space and venue for showing my work for a long time.  I hope to continue reaching out to my extended community, as I have done with the Ink Shop Printmaking Center in Ithaca,  in meaningful ways.  We are located on the Finger Lakes wine trail, surrounded by a large number of top-notch wineries that produce some of the finest red and white wines in the country. My hope is to create a place - indeed a PLACE -  that has serves many purposes (music, theatric performances, movies, farmer's market???) but above all a place to celebrate artists and their creations, including mine!

Here is the beginning phases of the installation and thesis work spread out on the floor!

                                                          The sanctuary downstairs:

                                                         
                                                             Kitchen-to-be:

                                                          Stairway up to the gallery:

                                                          Outside views of the church:

The Screen

Completed right before the June residency, this screen consists of four panels made of plywood, maple, chestnut wood, digital prints, acrylic paint, and graphite text.  Each concave/convex unit is interchangeable and can be configured either in a serpentine or half-circle fashion.  The piece is a confrontation of points of view, with a paradoxical confluence of photographically-rich surfaces and voided discarded objects from the Kendaia site. The representation of place unfolds in both a visual and verbal manner.  Finding the meaning of place involves a multi-faceted dimensional experience, in part revealed/concealed. 

The Encounter

What is the sense of place? Through the hand-pulled print and the photograph, I examine the intersection between the individual and nature in the experience of particular places.   Social, cultural, and historical trajectories sometimes collide at these moments of the encounter.  My work explores the complexity of lived experience, in terms of immediate materialities, the nature of perception, and apparent absences. By various means and through multiple approaches, my work investigates the act of experiencing place from different points of view. Each image thus expresses an element of experience.  I create productive tensions between orientation and disorientation, frozen moments and duration, original and copy, image and text, in order to re-imagine and find meaning in my relationship to the world. The muttivalent character of my creative explorations shows a complex negotiation between idea, materials, historic fact, perceptual nuance, and mediated image. These encounters convey an existential uncertainly about my place in the world.  Finding place is in a sense, then, about finding myself. Nature, culture, and self are all part of the experience of place. This is where I unfold the meaning of presence.

The Event of the Red Cup

I begin with Kendaia, a historic place in upstate New York. My home is just a twenty minute drive away. I am here to visit the site of an old Iroquois village ravaged by Generals Sullivan and Clinton in the late 1700s, during the era when colonists were expanding their power and control over areas of the Northeast.  I initially drive past the site without seeing the NYS marker nor the stone monument that are there.  The presence of a picnic table, no littering signs, and two markers indicating State Park property verify that this is the place I am seeking.  For material evidence of the Iroquois who once lived here, there is nothing.  I know that the Iroquois sided with the British during the Revolutionary War.  I know of the Sullivan/Clinton Trail that follows the eastern shore of Seneca Lake, snaking past my house on Route 414, where another NYS marker is placed acknowledging the Iroquois site Con-Daw-Haw. The Kendaia monument mentions the hostile Indian nations whom the commemorated Generals were sent to abolish. A map of the region shows the trail of scorched earth established by the orders of President Washington. I am not convinced that the monument's commemoration tells the whole story. I wander around the perimeter of the mowed lawn of the site, alone with the entanglements of tree, detritus, stream, wild raspberry and grapevine, blue sky, fresh air.  A flicker of red appears--a red cup.  It is somehow not surprising, maddingly unfortunate yes, and certainly out of place.  The no litter signs should have been adequate to remind visitors of their responsibilities.

But then something else about the red cup halted my wandering. The uniqueness of the moment where the red cup, me, the absent Iroquois, trees, blue sky, picnic table, and state park converge in this place. I needed to understand how this is to be; what were the reasons for both the absence of material history and the presence of a red cup to appear in this paradoxical fashion, demanded my attention.  Questions about place as an eventmental site for the production of meaning became clear.  Historic memory, perceptual experience, and the mediated image become the focus of my work.  The red cup is both the end and the beginning of the journey.

Kendaia Series

I have been working on this series Kendaia for most of the semester.  Kendaia is an Iroquois site about 20 minutes from where I live.  This place is a multivalent confluence of historical, cultural, and historical events, and in the words of philosopher Edward Casey is "eventmental".  This series  I use my own documentary photographs as a record of the site, which then are further mediated through a paper lithography process, where each color is separately printed, layer over layer.  The mediation reflects the layered content of the site. The printing process causes a perceptual blur, which obscures the visual definition of the various elements in the image. In each print I also include a bit of trash -- a cup, a bottle, cans, styrofoam, or a cigarette case. Perceptually the space is vibrantly alive with texture and color, but it also includes inherently these odd inclusions.  This "horizontal" portrayal of the materialities of life are juxtaposed with ghostly skin-like drawn forms that are sewn on, transparently revealing the ground beneath.  These images beg the questions: What is real? What is seen or not seen? Who is seeing? Are we in a suspended moment of time? 

Here is a peak of some of them.  They are still a work in progress, and will hopefully be completed by the June residency!  There are seven of them in this series.  A second taller (67 inches) Kendaia series with eight panels will be coming soon as well!  I wish I had another month to finish all of these!

Kendaia -- Skins, Topographies, and Horizons

Kendaia is a site.  Pascal is quoted as saying, "Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose limits are nowhere."  Robert Smithson sees the world similarly, as a kind of unedited text, remote, without logos, and undefined.  I am fascinated by Kendaia for a number of reasons, but primarily because it is undefined in this sense.   On the other hand, like an archeologist, I performed a visual mining at the site, where I have collected, through the use of photography, images that are the skins of experience.  Robert Smithson, too, selected materials from the sites to create his non-sites, which represent a focused articulation of part of the actual site.  In the same way, I choose to articulate some specific elements through the idea of skins, topology, and horizons. Each skin-form rematerializes the aspects of the site to give meaning to the sense of place. 

Below are three projects I have recently finished.  "Skins" is a family of columnar paper constructions of photographs from Kendaia.  Each image is a xerox on large paper saturated with pigmented encaustic.  They are translucent, fragile, and entirely contingent on one another for support and visual impact.  Each image shows the ground littered with leaves, branches, stems, and debris, tossed from car windows or left there by passersby. 

The second series are Skin Topographies, paper painted on both sides, folded, and curled matrices saturated with clear wax, which are hung as low reliefs from the wall.  These give expression to an alphabet of forms that individually show presence, and appear together as an alphabet of forms like a visual sentence about Kendaia.  They are the photographic reconfiguration of the horizon, then reconstructed in Photoshop to reflect the same horizon as its mirrored image.  Each topographic form has both horizons.  The picture plane is rematerialized into embodied forms as part of another language.

Finally, the last piece is a compilation of views, the same series of stills of the horizon at Kendaia, but juxtaposed and arranged sequentially.  The horizon is again mirrored in each still.  The scroll, then, was immersed in clear wax, and a red thread was sewn along the two horizon lines -- in honor of the Two Row Wampum of the Haudenosaunee. The scroll is self-standing, translucent, reflective, and in the round.

Chelsea Galleries & El Anatsui at High Line

This weekend my husband and I went to NYC again.  After meeting with my mentor Marc Handelman, we ventured into Chelsea to see some galleries. Galleri Lelong hosted a small but great show of work by Arte Provera artists Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, and Mario Merz.  Fabro's marbleand gold leaf piece and Kounellis' coal/steel/wire piece and his burlap sacks with steel were especially intriguing.

Robert Miller Gallery was showing the collaborative show of South African Beezy Bailey and Dave Matthews.  Based on a video taken by Dave Matthews of Beezy performing in a fatman suit, Beezy created a series of mixed media pieces that contain elements of painting and printmaking. They seemed to explore the issue of identity and alter ego.

The International Print Center New York hosted their New Prints 2013/Winter show which had an uneven collection of prints.  Nicola Lopez large Infrastructure print was great to see, as were some more sculptural pieces.

The Heller Gallery exhibits only glass artists, some of whom work at Corning Glass near where I live.  A wonderful video showed the glass artists producing some very beautiful pieces, some of which were on display in the gallery.

Lastly, we had a chance to see El Anatsui's largest piece ever which he recently installed at the High Line. He used a combination of rusted metal pieces and mirrors to reflect the sky and buildings.

El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum

My two most recent visits to New York City to meet with my new mentor Marc Handelman, who has his studio in Brooklyn, provided wonderful opportunities to see some great exhibits.

The monumental pieces by El Anatsui at the Brooklyn Museum are fantastic in every way.  Like the Arte Provera artists, he uses found materials like bottle caps, rusted metal, paint can lids, old newspapers, etc to construct these huge tapestry-like sculptural forms.  These simple materials are transformed into poetic statements that read like topographic landscapes that shimmer with gold or silver, and hang with a sense of weight and mass.  Some hang directly from the wall or from the ceiling.  The central installation consisted of delicate lattices of woven metal hung like gigantic drapes or sheets that revealed passersby but intersected the gallery space with curious obfuscations and overlays of textured woven material.  Materiality was key, so despite the monumentality of the artwork, one is very aware of the small bottle caps and wire used to assemble the enumerable pieces that form the massive hangings.  Just as impressive were the paper bag series of self-standing bag pieces, larger than life, like Stonehenge or ancestral monuments for the consumer industry.  The snake-like sculptures that meander along the floor and part way up the wall, were intriguing as well. Here are a few images from the show: