Flat Aerials

I've had a flu/cold for the last two weeks and haven't been able to spend much time in the studio. All I've been able to muster the energy for is my work at the museum and a couple of hours here and there before and after the museum work. Mostly, I've been working at home on some smaller pieces and sorting out what's left of my home studio.

Today I moved several things that had been piling up at home to the downtown studio, worked for a few hours there and took the photos below. They're a couple of the painted aerials I moved today. I started these in the fall of 2005 right after we moved to Knoxville from Los Angeles. That these were the first new pieces I started within a couple of months of moving to the new location is personally significant considering their pastoral, even agricultural, quality. At this point, they're still works-in-progress.

Note:I filled the unpainted parts digitally with pale blue to experiment with alternatives to the white of the unpainted gesso.


Random Aerial #3 (vertical pastoral sketch) and Random Aerial #4 (horizontal pastoral sketch)

These paintings explore my relationship to sites of city and country and to a "naturalized" view of the human imprint on the landscape. As most of my other work, these pieces play with ways of knowing a landscape: either through a sequenced / time-based relationship (as in walking, one foot / image in front of the other) or a spatial, holistic and mapped view. These pieces would be the mapped view. All this is nuanced by my personal experience of moving back to Appalachia from Los Angeles and the loss of the imagined relationship to "the country" from afar.

These aren't paintings in the usual sense as I used processes more akin to fiber dyeing than to mark-making or brush-work. First, I allowed the paint to move about on the panel in response to my controlled motions (similar to what I'd discovered earlier with dyeing and staining raw canvases). With this process, images emerge that are simultaneously random and patterned as with other dendritic forms. Upon seeing such forms emerge, the process made it easy for me to imagine I was as much a force of nature governed by physical parameters as a collection of trees, a leaf or a city like Los Angeles. My movements and thoughts constructed the same forms as a branching tree, a forking river, a vine of ivy, a clump of blood vessels, an interstate freeway system or a cancer.

Second in the process, I deliberately filled-in the spaces created between the randomness. This part of the process was very deliberate and opened the work up to choice, patterns and a different form of repetition.

I found the relationship between the precision and the fluidity to be meaningful during that time of transition. In fact, I find this work to be very personal as it reveals my thought processes and struggles at a time when I was trying to re-situate myself in a location that (in nostalgic recollection) I had believed to be familiar and, yet, was so utterly different than the city which I'd become accustomed and whose streets and freeways I knew so intimately.

November open studio, artist's statement

The working title of this series is called Tourism and Tragedy or How I learned to love where I am. This body of work is a subjective look at migration, tourism and the difficulty of presence. I’m interested in how individual experiences of particular places are mediated (and somewhat determined by) language, narrative, memory and nostalgia.

The works-in-progress shown here are a documentation of my search for and attempt to recapture a nostalgic ideal of “A Perfect Fall.” With their reference to the Eden myth, trees and Fall (the season of great beauty and loss, the mythic Fall of Mankind, falling short of an ideal, falling down) – these pieces record a striving for some idealized state, the falling short of that achievement, accepting of loss and delighting in imperfect beauty.

L.A. Trees #2: Topiary (Plato’s Tree), sets the tone for the nostalgia. This video is a sequence of still photos taken of topped and butchered trees in Los Angeles. The images are paired, story-book style, with a personal romantic narrative of my last Fall in East TN before moving to L.A. for nearly a decade. It’s a story of hope tinged with loss.

The Perfect Tree for the Perfect Fall, is a mixed-media piece that answers the L.A. Trees video and the nostalgia that grew out of living in a place without Fall color for so many years. In this piece, I paint, stitch and photograph images to build a “perfect” Fall tree. The photos are taken of one tree from multiple perspectives over the course of the season as the tree peaks into color, fades and loses its leaves. The end product will be a multi-perspectival composite of an idealized form – a flat representation where only traces and suggestions of three-dimensional space and time remain.

Leaf Angels in the manner of Ana Mendieta, similarly records the human body as an object of loss. Here, objects of beauty are photographed after their peak – their remains preserved as printed images stitched to a painted and dyed representation of the pavement on which they’ve fallen. All that survives are their representations and the traced / stitched outlines and shadow of the artist / tourist arriving too late and missing her opportunity to photograph the “perfect” scene.

October open studio, artist's statement

The working title of this series is called Tourism and Tragedy or How I learned to love where I am.
Image from L.A. Trees #1 and Picture Postcards with Skylines

This body of work is a subjective look at migration, tourism and the difficulty of presence. I'm interested in how an individual experience of a particular place is mediated (and somewhat determined by) language, narrative, memory and experiences of other places – both real and imagined.

Formally, the work plays with stillness and sequences / place and time. For instance, still photography is paired with written narrative in L.A. Trees #1: Palm & Sunset (Paradise / Apocalypse). Although the video medium affords a more time-based approach, movement through this particular palm-treed space has been frozen with a short sequence of photos at sunset. This stillness allows the narrative captioning to be the driving element that marks time.

In Picture Postcards with Skylines, the medium has been similarly altered. The sequence of digital images marks not only the subtle changes in two different landscapes (CA and TN) over a period of a few minutes, but constructs a fragmented panorama of imaginary place. Powerlines intersecting the skies – accentuated with machine stitching – interrupt and fragment the postcard quality of the photos and draw the two places together.

Green is the Color of my Nostalgia plays with abstraction as a parallel to incomplete memory and the psychological processes that perfect and limit recollection. Here I have created a single representation of two mountain spaces (The Smoky and Santa Monica Mountains) and their details from memory. The choice of materials (cheesecloth, plastic, etc) combined with sparse drawing and machine stitching reinforces the feeling of impossibility that occurs when trying to match physical places to my memories of them.