The printing was fantastic and I learned quite a bit about lithography in the process. It ended up having seven layers in total: four litho layers and three screen-printed layers; the whole piece was based off of some digital photography that I've been working with in a series called Songs for the White Owl, a sort of response to Ted Hughes poem Songs against the White Owl. The final image is below.
I also worked on two presentations for an artist's talk; one completely written out and another that was off the cuff. The written one didn't work for the presentation because it was difficult for me to connect it fluidly to the work in the presentation; I do, however, think that it provides a good conceptual framework for my approach to art making, so I'll post the talk, in three parts, here. Fair warning: it is unedited, so there might be some gnarly wording.
Preamble and Part I
It might take a while for me to set up the framework for the
most potent aspects of my work so please bear with me. I will be showing work throughout my
lecture but pieces and parts will build up to more of a design of the whole
picture towards the end. I find
that this is the best approach to presenting my work because, in part, it
preserves some structured ambiguity between what I am talking of and what is in
the work, that gradually develops as the lecture goes on. As Will Oldham just wrote in Poetry
Magazine this June, in 'To Hell with Drawers: Poetry as cabinetry' :
"The difference between lyrics and poetry is that I
don't understand poetry. I don't
understand biology either. Someone
must be there to guide me through the meanings of things…I also do not like
drawers. There must be shelves,
where the contents are visible.
When things are hidden in drawers, they do not exist…My mind is kept in
a drawer, in the end. And the
drawer hides its contents from view…"
Its difficult to a certain extent to tell exactly how
Oldham's facetiousness defends the structure of my talk, but I want to
simultaneously guide you through the meanings of things and, also, defend that
things hiding in drawers can be interesting. For me to explain every mark is to bore you to tears; for me
to say that everything is a matter of happenstance is to deny my own nature of
finding and developing meaning in art making and life.
I have grown up and lived all of my life in the
Midwest. I've always needed to
connect to my family and ancestry as a means to forming part of my identity, so
Midwestern-ness is a big part of that identity; my mother's family was largely
farmers, Dutch-German immigrants in Pennsylvania and then Indiana. My father's family is much more
assorted in its ancestry--with some records reporting Cherokee from Eastern
Tennessee along with the typical mixture of European immigrants. My father's family, however, settled in
the Moccasin Gap near Gate City, Virginia, in the Appalachian Mountains. Farming is also a part of the history
of that side of the family, along with logging and a family rock quarry. It took me some time as I was growing
up to realize the meaning of this history; I often wanted something concrete to
connect to in forming my identity.
As I've grown older, however, I have realized how this truly impacts my
life and work.
I. Understanding the morning, every new day
While I've always had a penchant for the rural and
"down-home" aesthetic, I've tried to develop ways of not simply
relying on the visual language of the rural to suffice for my content. I do feel like I made a number of
successful pieces during this development and struggle, due largely in part to
my interest in geography, specifically human geography. Not only did it connect the placeness
that I was feeling as I was establishing my identity (being Midwestern,
traveling to Appalachia every year) but human geography is less scientific in
nature and more about seeing place, location, or space as a state of context,
not simply an individual point to study.
Yi Fu Tuan and Gaston Bachelard were the most influential
thinkers as I started to develop my work and connect it to a way of
living. Bachelard is typically
considered to be a phenomenologist, but his book The Poetics of Space and many of his other writings have appealed
to my sense of place and been instructive in another aspect of life and
work--the poetic aspects of being.
A good example of Bachelard's poetics deals with something
that I have thought about for some time, especially as it grows colder and I
tend to do things like bake bread, read and write poetry, and reflect more on
what is happening. He states:
"Winter is by far the oldest of the seasons. Not only does it confer age upon our
memories, taking us back to a remote past but, on snowy days, the house too is
old."
Why does this transition happen during fall? Why does my lifestyle and identity
change as it grows colder? Though
I don't know the exact answers, I've started to learn and understand a sort of
archetype of being, in the most general sense evidence of a cycle that is
prevalent in my concept a day, my idea of a year, and my impression and
anticipation of a lifetime, including the seasonal changes of the year, the
changes of light in both a day and a year, and other experiential aspects of
living. Ontology is, like
geography, something that is contextual, and the philosophical writing and
ideas of being should be considered with the experiential context of every day
life.
song for the white owl: sleep will wait, 2012
lithography and screen print, ed. of 16
printed with Erik Waterkotte at the UNC Charlotte print shopt
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