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| Postcard III - "Connectedness" 2020 |
30.5.20
Quarantine Art - Postcards from the Edge - "Overthought"
I have thought about making postcards for the quarantine. People love receiving mail. While a "wish you were here" may not be completely appropriate in the age of social distancing, I like the idea of people being able to get a little bit of art and frivolity in their mail box. It is also always nice to know you have been thought of.
Furthermore, I wanted to create the opportunity to share in some of the sleepless nights and odd dreams that have become part of our shared pandemic experience.
I had not wanted to mass-produce them, so that every recipient would receive a one of a kind piece.
Despite the stuff the road to hell happens to be paved with, I have not worked out the logistics of making any of my crappy glue-stick collages sturdy enough to send by post, especially if I am not sending reproductions of the original. A good number of the pieces I have been making are too big, but I am hoping to figure out a means of making a bunch of smaller sendable pieces.
Furthermore, I wanted to create the opportunity to share in some of the sleepless nights and odd dreams that have become part of our shared pandemic experience.
I had not wanted to mass-produce them, so that every recipient would receive a one of a kind piece.
Despite the stuff the road to hell happens to be paved with, I have not worked out the logistics of making any of my crappy glue-stick collages sturdy enough to send by post, especially if I am not sending reproductions of the original. A good number of the pieces I have been making are too big, but I am hoping to figure out a means of making a bunch of smaller sendable pieces.
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| Postcard I - Overthought 2020 |
Collage Art - the old stuff
The following are photographs of older collage pieces I made.
While I have sold or donated some pieces to art functions and fund raisers in the past, these are still in my possession. The pieces here were either never for sale or no one wished to purchase them. So, they live on the walls of my house.
They are framed and do not scan well. Hence, the crappy phone photos.
They were all made sometime between 2006 and 2017. I cannot recall which pieces were made when, though I am attempting to put them up in some form of chronological order. While I typically dislike untitled works, some had titles that are lost to memory.
While I have sold or donated some pieces to art functions and fund raisers in the past, these are still in my possession. The pieces here were either never for sale or no one wished to purchase them. So, they live on the walls of my house.
They are framed and do not scan well. Hence, the crappy phone photos.
They were all made sometime between 2006 and 2017. I cannot recall which pieces were made when, though I am attempting to put them up in some form of chronological order. While I typically dislike untitled works, some had titles that are lost to memory.
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| The Possessed, circa 2006-08 |
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| Perhaps Womanhood, circa 2006-07 |
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| Justice, circa 2009-10 |
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| Home Sweet Home, circa 2015-16 |
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| Perhaps The Inner Child, circa 2015-16 |
Collage Art - A broader narrative for the New World, and the storm before the drought
Typically, I make collage pieces without a plan. Rather, I let the available images I am cutting come together in the moment. As a result, most of my pieces tend be rather surreal. They often lack specific themes (though I may interpret the result after completion) or image structure. Beyond a gut feeling as to the aesthetic of the disparate images in juxtaposition, I feel I have little directorial role in the outcomes. In that sense, my collages are rather process-oriented.
One year, the Beatnik Lounge and Gallery (in Joshua Tree) was holding a Thanksgiving show, and I wanted to create a special piece for the event. Many of the shows there challenged me to consider the title or theme's deeper implications. I had been considering the "traditional" (you know) images of the first Thanksgiving and the overly reverent, Hallmark-style white-washed nostalgia that always attends such classical American traditions. While I am not a particular advocate of wholesale dismissal of beloved cultural symbols, they often provide only a limited view or narrative. There is always more than one way of looking at things.
The U.S. Capitol Rotunda bears a classic piece of American art (as in, before we produced any decent art, in my opinion) commemorating the landing of Columbus in the near world. It was painted by John Vanderlyn. The painting clearly seeks to portray the European Age of Exploration and embedded ideas best suited to promote the nascent Republic and its Manifest Destiny. A crowd of prayerful and celebratory white men make landfall on a wild shore. It is meant to show a Terra Nullius despite the lurking indigenous presence. Natives are squeezed to the background, cowering and worshipful at the edges of the forest. It is a motif that has existed in multiple forms. For reference, the original painting is at the bottom of this post. It was originally positioned here, but I do not want to give it pride of place.
For this show, I wanted to a produce a response to it that incorporated the similar layout and impression while rebutting and broadening the original historical perspective. If this is to be a symbol of America, I wanted it to incorporate a more beautifully varied and often contradictory collection of narratives. All the better to represent and celebrate the diversity that makes up the sort of America I feel is worth celebrating.
As a piece of work, this was a major departure for me. I uncharacteristically approached this with an outline of the layout. While the individual component parts were serendipitously culled from the print materials I had ready access to (Smithsonian and National Geographic magazines, issues of Time and AAA monthly, brochures and travel periodicals from thrift stores...), they would all be fitting into a larger pictorial that would match the original painting. Furthermore, I was working at a scale I had never before attempted. Most of my collage works ranged in size anywhere from that of a postcard to a legal sized sheet of paper. The finished piece, shown below is about four feet in length. It consists of over 100 individual images and pieces of paper that were cut, arranged, overlaid, and glued together by hand.
As I have been writing this, I realize is far better articulated by Terese Marie Mailhot, "the truth of my life as an Indian woman has asked that I hold many things: white histories and my people's and other nation's stories, passed on and unwritten but still living. As an indigenous person, in order to find the true history of other indigenous nations, I must remind myself that history doesn't exist in a linear progression; it's duplicitous and not always found in books. So much has been erased, and too much still has to be uncovered."
An obvious title presented itself as I completed the piece: "E Pluribus Unum." Out of Many, One. The America I want to call home is home to many like and unalike. It is a diverse place, and big enough to handle and embrace many different people and stories. A messy work in progress.
It is not a great photo. Difficult to get it without a light source washing out some portion of the image. And way to big for me to scan.
That show was in November of 2016. While the celebration this art was meant to embody was sucker punched, it was ever so needed.
One year, the Beatnik Lounge and Gallery (in Joshua Tree) was holding a Thanksgiving show, and I wanted to create a special piece for the event. Many of the shows there challenged me to consider the title or theme's deeper implications. I had been considering the "traditional" (you know) images of the first Thanksgiving and the overly reverent, Hallmark-style white-washed nostalgia that always attends such classical American traditions. While I am not a particular advocate of wholesale dismissal of beloved cultural symbols, they often provide only a limited view or narrative. There is always more than one way of looking at things.
The U.S. Capitol Rotunda bears a classic piece of American art (as in, before we produced any decent art, in my opinion) commemorating the landing of Columbus in the near world. It was painted by John Vanderlyn. The painting clearly seeks to portray the European Age of Exploration and embedded ideas best suited to promote the nascent Republic and its Manifest Destiny. A crowd of prayerful and celebratory white men make landfall on a wild shore. It is meant to show a Terra Nullius despite the lurking indigenous presence. Natives are squeezed to the background, cowering and worshipful at the edges of the forest. It is a motif that has existed in multiple forms. For reference, the original painting is at the bottom of this post. It was originally positioned here, but I do not want to give it pride of place.
For this show, I wanted to a produce a response to it that incorporated the similar layout and impression while rebutting and broadening the original historical perspective. If this is to be a symbol of America, I wanted it to incorporate a more beautifully varied and often contradictory collection of narratives. All the better to represent and celebrate the diversity that makes up the sort of America I feel is worth celebrating.
As a piece of work, this was a major departure for me. I uncharacteristically approached this with an outline of the layout. While the individual component parts were serendipitously culled from the print materials I had ready access to (Smithsonian and National Geographic magazines, issues of Time and AAA monthly, brochures and travel periodicals from thrift stores...), they would all be fitting into a larger pictorial that would match the original painting. Furthermore, I was working at a scale I had never before attempted. Most of my collage works ranged in size anywhere from that of a postcard to a legal sized sheet of paper. The finished piece, shown below is about four feet in length. It consists of over 100 individual images and pieces of paper that were cut, arranged, overlaid, and glued together by hand.
As I have been writing this, I realize is far better articulated by Terese Marie Mailhot, "the truth of my life as an Indian woman has asked that I hold many things: white histories and my people's and other nation's stories, passed on and unwritten but still living. As an indigenous person, in order to find the true history of other indigenous nations, I must remind myself that history doesn't exist in a linear progression; it's duplicitous and not always found in books. So much has been erased, and too much still has to be uncovered."
An obvious title presented itself as I completed the piece: "E Pluribus Unum." Out of Many, One. The America I want to call home is home to many like and unalike. It is a diverse place, and big enough to handle and embrace many different people and stories. A messy work in progress.
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| E Pluribus Unum (2016) |
It is not a great photo. Difficult to get it without a light source washing out some portion of the image. And way to big for me to scan.
That show was in November of 2016. While the celebration this art was meant to embody was sucker punched, it was ever so needed.
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| Landing of Columbus (1842-47), John Vanderlyn |
21.5.20
Quarantine Art - Unkowning My Place
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| Unkowing My Place, 2020. |
Quarantine Art - New technique experiment
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| Stop, 2020. |
I hope to create more of a series with these, incorporating visual elements of Australian indigenous art, Verner Panton, and psychedelia into my already somewhat surreal aesthetic.
Quarantine Art - Fickle Miracles (unfinished)
It is a bit too large to fit in the scanner, so a quick phone-snap will have to do for now.
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| Fickle Miracles, 2020 |
6.5.20
Quarantine Art - Experiment in Abstraction
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| Firsts (2020) |
Inspired by several sleepless nights, I once created a triptych of swirling and amorphous black pieces of paper to capture the feeling of my mind speeding up after turning off the light.
I have found a lot of bold, blank colours in the magazines I have been cutting up for my collage. A pure abstraction of such hues was the first inspiration. However, I felt it would be quite flat. An article's title page presented an appealing script of the word "firsts". When isolated from type-set and syntax, the letters themselves become their own shapes. Language is a system of agreed-upon symbols. However, the scripts of written language are not universal symbols. The inherent contradictions appeal to me. In my travels, I have meandered through venues where foreign scripts I cannot read remind me that illiteracy is a relative concept.
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