Paintings, prints, assemblages/wall hanging.
Text based work
2 blogs: my painting blog documents my work as an Internet show/tell, my MFA-IA blog documents my packet essays and progression of research.
I used Picasa to document my “vagina” component project with images meant to coincide with an essay about patterns, process and time. This interdisciplinary approach of “speaking nearby” between image and word, is a method I’d like to continue pursuing, leading me to consider it in the form of an installation and/or stop-action animations.
Systems were an overt and underlying theme in my work this semester: the grid, repetition, units, layers, time; concepts of closed systems where nothing can get in or out and open systems where there is permeability. Patterns: of society, politics, aesthetics, science, disciplines, people. “How do you anticipate a future you haven’t experienced?” was a question that arose from trying to understand the multiple systems converging into the current economic crisis and the people affected; with the abstraction of statistics, we don’t comprehend the meaning of the data, the context, the realities of the actual people represented by numbers, formulas, and equations. This study segued into my “vagina” project— gender based crimes of war and domestic violence.
Continued study of Japanese poetry and art is evident in my use of scale, proportion and perspective in my paintings: compressed or isolated into a singular event, the shifts of perspective are from looking at, down, and through.
I studied Printmaking methods that don’t require a mechanical printing press to experiment with the repeated image. I explored Monotypes, but most often I utilized a stamping process, finding or making my stamping “tool” and trying a variety of substrates and paints.
What intellectual research and study have you engaged in this semester (i.e., what authors have you read, artists studied, music listened to, dance or theatre attended, etc.)? What other areas of inquiry have you pursued? What would you say are the learning outcomes of this research? Please attach an annotated bibliography.
The retina is made from brain cells, the brain begins at the back of the eye— seeing turns into thinking right there. But visuality is more than cognitive function, or “natural”. Our structure of visuality and representation is defined by systems of power and/or economics; a convincing argument for the Renaissance nudes—appropriation of mostly female bodies—has a lot to do with the new relationship between artists and patrons in that time.
Visuality is also never as simple as a dichotomy between women and men; gay men and lesbian women have yet another set of perspectives to bring into the discussion. This should be important for a feminist reading of art history as well.
Feminism is still an active field and there is much work to be done on all levels- public as well as intimate. I think women have changed the discourse of art and art history tremendously in the past thirty years; part of the reason has to do with postmodernist rejections of the “canon”, and consequently, to the change of what constitutes valid art and art practices. In contemporary art, there is a huge emphasis on the body; beyond the traditional nude or its classical mythology, the body is up front and center, realized from various perspectives. Artists dismantle representation through the body, and it is through the body that the agenda of body politics comes up.
It’s difficult to know where interests end and influences begin, books, journalism, science, TV, music, poetry, people…the artists’ craft of painting influenced my writing and the writers’ craft influenced my painting. I carried forward my interest in quantum physics and engaged the Laws of Thermodynamics conceptually for my visual work and poetry.
Artists:
Richard Tuttle
Judy Pfaff
Ann Hamilton
El Anatsui
Eva Hesse
Georgia O’Keefe
Lee Krasner
African + Pacific Island fetishes/shrines
What products have emerged from this semester? Will any of those contribute toward your Portfolio and degree criteria requirements?
17 visual art works;
5 poems—3 at critique stage, 2 gestating;
Essays on practice/process.
V-Project: I am making an effort to reclaim the lost territory of connection and continuity in the chronology of historical discourse. The components I created are unsentimental symbols of vaginas—not meant to be essentialist or reductive, but imaging a part of the body hidden, yet not sealed off from the external world; they are passageways—not fixed points—connecting the inside with the outside, binding one being to another in complicated ways. They are portraits, memoir, autobiography, documentary, fictions.
The concepts motivating this project, experiments with systems, visual and text based work have been at work in defining my Portfolio and the degree criteria.
How has your work this semester affected your art practice and how you see yourself as an artist?
I asked three questions at the start of the semester: What ‘work’ does the ‘artwork’ do? What work do I want the artwork to do? What work does it do for art practice?
Things give themselves to be seen. It’s not the seer that initiates the visuality but the seen. The artist acts as a relay for other acts of reception, expanding the visual world to make visible what was invisible, making opportunity for others to see something they could not or did not see for themselves and expand the capacity to care, if they wish to.
I try to remain conscious of my posture and actions in the world surrounding me- moves and countermoves. Making art is an intimate and physical act, involving gesture and markmaking; the painting is a document of my private performance. The countermovement is a conceptual or metaphysical response to the world I am part of.
How much does identity intervene in the visual response? I am a woman, and also an artist, American, 47 years old, mother-of a daughter… Does this have any meaning for my intervention into the visual field, and if so, then what? While postmodernism allows me to work with a variety of perspectives, I believe we are not contained within the frame of absolutes, as in objectivity or subjectivity.
How do you see yourself progressing towards degree criteria, including developing a sense of context for your work, an understanding of the nature of art, and ability to engage in discourse?
Whether we like it or not, the chronology of western art history and traditions of painting exist; there is an impossibility with those traditions of making and exhibiting paintings even as it’s impossible for me not to paint. Most of the conventions and barriers between art forms have been blurred, dismantled and repopulated. In order for painting to survive, it had to find alliances with the other forms and I am currently working in the arena of that reinvention.
We live in an unsettled, moving and shifting world- a painting punches a hole in that momentum, slows time down and stretches the present moment. The paradox of the fixed object is that in order for it to survive, its meaning must change. ‘Good’ art is not formal objects; they have to be indeterminate enough to sustain reinterpretation over the years—they have to continue to ‘happen’.
Ultimately, with all the intention evident in my work, engagement with historical discourse, theory and critical analysis, what I meant to say is irrelevant. I have made a lot of paintings and written poetry and prose and in the end, they don’t have the meaning of what I had meant to say. What matters is, the consensus of experience of the audience: what the work means in a particular moment. This does not discount the artist, it frees the artist to be concerned with the process of thinking and the process of meaning.
Overall, what were your goals for this semester and how well do you think you met them? What do you see as your strengths of this semester? What areas, skills, etc., do you need to continue to work on?
My first solo exhibit was in February, installed in the gallery of a public art space. This body of work was comprised of 21 art objects, which I began in 2006. 18 of them were completed in the 9 months prior to the show, presenting work from G1 and G2.
While I was not disappointed in the coherence of my exhibit, I discovered that my concept of a body of work had not been thoroughly realized as I made the work. My current art work evolved from the preceding body; I deepened my focus on the concepts of time, space and process and limited my mediums to specific materials of metal, paint, paper and wood. As a result, all of the prints, paintings and poetry I worked on concentrated a central theme and are meant to be components in a series. I believe I achieved this goal successfully.
Another decision-making process I worked with is how to move from one painting to the next—lateral, back, forward, deeper, wider…Have I completed the research on this idea? Is there a final resolution? This was also accomplished.
I make things with my hands. And grapple with theory and critical discourse. Through research, readings and promptings of my advisor, I have become more aware and sensitive to the concerns and arguments of high culture / low culture, accessibility, appropriation, class, race, gender. While it is hugely important to me that art should be fundamentally integrated into all levels of society, so that it becomes a part of daily life instead of apart from it, I still haven’t found my method(s) for this as practice.
I’d like to practice more poetry and do more work on integrating my poetry into a physical format that is not “book arts”, not traditional printmaking, and which may include sound.
I still need to work on my self-discipline and creating enough mental space to accomplish my work.
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