After nearly a two month absence from the studio, time spent traveling, at residency, and mostly writing I was able to return to the core of my research, my practice. However, my studio like my head was in disarray. After a snowy and extremely cold January February had shown signs of spring while I sat chained to my computer at my dining room table. By the time March arrived and I was ready to head back to the basement and space between the wall and easel winter came back to teach us it ain't over til it's over by repeatedly socking us with snow storms and polar vortexes. I wanted to get back into the studio but was physically dreading the chill. Add to it Franzi and Petra were nowhere to be found. And Melusine was still dead.
What to do?
Where to start again?
Go back to the process.
All the work in this project originated in the initial deconstruction by Petra and myself of a digital collage I had made in 2005 by combining a figure - the artist Kara Walker as Glenda the Good Witch from a Vogue photo spread by Annie Leibovitz using famous contemporary artists as characters in The Wizard of Oz - colored solid with a Sharpie marker to make it a silhouette, with a scan of a painting I had made a year earlier. That painting - maybe some would call it a drawing - was a combination of paint markers and gel ink pens creating a dense web on top of a photo accompanying a profile of the painter Elizabeth Peyton also in an issue of Vogue from the early 2000s. For more on this see Good Witches of the Between, Part One.
I was not going to cut apart the panels of Elegy but I did have photos.
With the double-sided paintings the question became which side to work with? Non-cradled, cradled or both? I decided the more geometric forms on the non-cradled side offered a better point to begin. They are solid, structural and more object-like. There is a grammar embedded on the non-cradled side of Elegy which gives structure to its text. Through the process of making these forms have been taken far from the originals that gave birth to them in the Good Witches of the Between; the language they become as the text which structures Elegy makes them no more translations of the story of Dorothy's journey through the land of Oz, the state of the contemporary art world and its startists culture, or the events leading to Melusine's death and memorialization in this work. The language, the forms and grammar of this side of Elegy are more akin to 'representing thought' as Michel Foucault wrote of language in the Classical Age in The Order of Things:
“Representing must be understood in the strict sense: language represents thought as thought represents itself. To constitute language or give it life from within, there is no essential and primitive act of signification, but only, at the heart of representation, the power that it possesses to represent itself, that is, to analyse itself by juxtaposing itself to itself, part by part, under the eye of reflection, and to delegate itself in the form of a substitute that will be an extension of it. ... no sign ever appears, no word is spoken, no proposition is ever directed at any content except by the action of a representation that stands back from itself in another representation that is its equivalent. Representations are not rooted in a world that gives them meaning; they open themselves on to a space that is their own, whose internal network gives rise to meaning. And language exists in the gap that representation creates for itself. Words do not, then, form a thin film that duplicates thought on the outside; they recall thought, they indicate it, but inwards first of all, among all those representations that represent other representations. [1970, p.78]”
To get at that language representing thought I went back to my writing machine and the photos of Elegy.
Image files of Elegy panels open on my computer screen as I prepare to print.
Each photo was printed on my Canon inkjet printer on 8.5 x 11 inch 98 Bright 22 lb. paper.
Working back at my dinning room table where it was not only warmer but where I had spent the past six weeks writing, each photo was cut apart ...
and mounted on a page in a 9 x 12 inch ring bound sketchbook. Some of the pieces, like this one is a single shape cut from a photo.
The majority of shapes were combined to create a new shape on a single page, like this one.
The sketchbook contains 38 pages with an equal number of new shapes generated through the process of deciphering Elegy. Here is a selection of images - the photos were taken with my iPhone 6 on my dinning room table and the color/lighting is not accurate; I was also playing around with Photoshop on these files which explains the inconsistency in whiteness and tone. Finally, the orientation of each image shown has been set to landscape for the simple reason of consistency in this post. There is no given orientation for any of the shapes in this sketchbook.