Tag: Assemblages

Found Things: making art at the Ox

262314_573942727920_1508677231_nThis was a journal entry from 4 years ago–popped up on Facebook.

Found Things… The significance of a fond object is that it has none. Decathected, by being lost—though I don’t mean lost, so much as discarded. The objects I find on the street, in empty lots. Not things still useful—things sticky with the snare of desire. The desire that adheres to and generates the delusion of ownership.

I like these objects because they are free. I don’t want to own them. I don’t want to return them to a state of servitude, to become their slave.

When collected, placed in some degree of proximity, they suggest their own form of desire… placed beside, under, inside another object, I sense affinity—or indifference. If the former—it is as though they have become a new object, each retaining its own identity, but now also, a part—of something else.

These are the assemblages that I build… or better– build themselves when I lend them my attention.

The prime rule… is that there must be no rules. Else I would be the Master, the enforcer, the tyrant god … and so, eviscerate my own existence… for there are no gods. No Masters. Were I to aspire to that… I would not be.

Thematic Arragnements

A-Space organize

View GALLERY HERE.

Preparing for the A-Space show–giving a lot of thought to how I want to organize it. My work tends to migrate toward these broad, thematic areas–I hope to make this clear in my arrangements. I want to help people see what I’m doing, without overcoded interpretations.

 CHROMATICS & INVERSIONS:
Color exercises: watercolor or acrylic in inverted pairs– tone and colors (dark to light, light to dark): hue to complimentary hue (opposites on color wheel). Playing with color, like musical variations on a canon.
CITYSCAPES:
A new series in progress: from Plein Air street sketches to finished work, acrylics, assemblages & other media. Only 3, maybe 4 finished so far, but will tape the sketches to the wall around them to show the relationships.
BROKEN PAVEMENT
Series in several mediums, drawing on patterns and textures of pavement and streets.
RHIZOMATICS! Cells, Maps, Words
The first art I got paid for was in a class on comparative embryology; Professor paid me for crow quill pen and inks–microscopic slides of chick embryos. This is a Series in several mediums, inspired by photos in an histology text book. Free renditions, patterns and lines of communication— in no way meant to be biologically accurate illustrations! There’s a visual affinity for me between these and MAPS, and WORDS.

ASSEMBLAGES

Arrangements of Found Things, street trash, dirt, broken glass—the detritus of Late Capitalism—discarded identities in search of new relationships.

FAERIE TREES

Human Arboreal Intercourse

 

I don’t work from an abstract concept of the theme… more something that develops from a primarily visual interest.
There may be crossovers for any of these.

Patterns/texture–revolutionary chaos

images

 

“Bio Filters,” posted on DeviantArt,  speaks to my fascination with organic textures, which I’m coming to understand as a fascination with pattern: after all, texture in nature is but the sensuous expression of pattern, and discovering patterns–and combining them, combining them in antithetical (or should I say, incommensurate) combinations, plays an increasingly important role in my art. I think this is visible in 3 of my recent works:

#480

#481

and #482

…as well as my Pavement Series of last year, and all of my trash assemblages (we too, are ‘Nature,’ and all things we do and make, we do and make by Nature’s rules). I’ve only begun to see how this works with my acrylic paintings and larger larger pieces.

Pattern & structure are present in deterioration & decay. Entropy simplifies, but doesn’t destroy, structure. Political, social and economic structures become rigid, resisting change, stifling freedom. Visualizing decaying patterns becomes a psychological extension of a search for fissures in the borders, locations of breakdowns where new, generative patterns may begin to form. I think of my most abstract work as no less political than pieces with explicit “messages,” … and more truly subversive.

 

 

Living in Imagination

Spirit Stick
Spirit Stick: Photo by Lillian Dunn. The snake is a toilet paper tube, colored with crayons.

But are these powers real? you ask. Real, as imagination is real, as the world opens to us, yes, and we live within our wonder. Within—not outside examining, measuring, weighing from the cyclic year of endless drought, but timeless, or timeleaping making memories, our lives out of dreams—outing our dreams and finding them in things, the things we make and do: in poems, in art, in the work of our bodies. Now and then it happens, and we don’t know what it is that has happened—a feather and a sash on a walking stick becomes or was both dream and waking action, know it by how it persists, endures, the dream that comes again changing forms, begging recognition, understanding… not in explanation or translation (so called, interpretation), but in following where it leads.

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