Excited to be in the First Friday conversation tomorrow. I'll be at Rala in the Old City with a new body of work that I'm experimenting with and, permission pending, an interactive installation of sorts.
Here's a talk I gave a few weeks ago at LMU on other peices in the series:
Good evening and thank you for being here. I'm really pleased getting to have a conversation about this body of work in this particular place given the shared Appalachian context.
This work is sourced from my family history. I decided to approach it in a chronological order to minimize my editorial bias. They're as much documentation as ruminations on memory, cultural context, and the formation of identity. The imagery is collected from my photos but a strictly linear narrative is not the aim. Instead I'm opting for a more metaphorical approach to story telling and meaning making through materials and process.
For example, the three step transfer from a source photo to vellum and then carbon copy mimics the reconstruction of memories and family narrative through time in order to fit our present mental, emotional, and cultural frameworks. Color and pattern are employed to ruminate on relationship - the way color interacts with its neighboring hues to create an intangible sense of harmony or dissonance, echoing the subtle nuances of perception. The behavior of the paint, the extent to which I am able to exercise control, is a meditation on personal choice, forces of divinity, and natural order on human fates; the moments when the paint is allowed to choose its own course and how all of it marks an action occurring in the past but is living on in the present.
All of the elements are situated in a domestic sphere with an emphasis on relationships, intimate scale, and inferiority. These decisions stem from the tension of inhabiting a feminine identity.
As for art references and influences, I've drawn from Henry Darger, captivated by his collision of an idiosyncratic world view and the bank of sourced imagery from popular publications. Fritz Scholder for the way he was able to work with customary imagery with an innovative approach that opens fresh dialogue. As well as an interest in pop art because I care about finding the undwrcurrent of trends and facets of life we often take for granted.
With that, I'll open the converse ok for dialogue. This work is new for me and so I'm still learning from it and am happy to hear any questions or thoughts as an extension of that process. Thank you.
