May 2011
master_slave
In technology, master_slave refers to a model of communication. It is the key element to Hegel's dialectic. It can also be understood as a dialogue about my often troubled relationship with paint.
The role of 'abstract' painting can be compared to the role of material labour in the 20th century. Both have been understood in tangent with ideas of a transcendent Hegelian spirit and materialist structure. At the current moment both share in a sense of exhaustion. While labour and production has been replaced with branding and advertising, painting has lost its former status.
For those of us with a vested interest in keeping painting alive, we turn to the ways in which painting continues to reinvent itself. Painting has moved into an "expanded field" of hybrids, experienced in site-specific performance work, senseless objects, digital projections, real-time performance events, and a multitude of other incarnations. The materiality of painting is seen by some as a call for humanizing a posthuman world. The "ooze" of paint has been reconsidered by more than one feminist art historian as significant to an embodied gendered experience.
In my own practice I often vacillate between these ideas, as well as those regarding the relevance of visual pleasure or the understanding of time and space within our expanded fields of consciousness. On occasion the work opens into a space of immanence beyond the confines of the master_slave dichotomy. It is these moments that keep me going.
In technology, master_slave refers to a model of communication. It is the key element to Hegel's dialectic. It can also be understood as a dialogue about my often troubled relationship with paint.
The role of 'abstract' painting can be compared to the role of material labour in the 20th century. Both have been understood in tangent with ideas of a transcendent Hegelian spirit and materialist structure. At the current moment both share in a sense of exhaustion. While labour and production has been replaced with branding and advertising, painting has lost its former status.
For those of us with a vested interest in keeping painting alive, we turn to the ways in which painting continues to reinvent itself. Painting has moved into an "expanded field" of hybrids, experienced in site-specific performance work, senseless objects, digital projections, real-time performance events, and a multitude of other incarnations. The materiality of painting is seen by some as a call for humanizing a posthuman world. The "ooze" of paint has been reconsidered by more than one feminist art historian as significant to an embodied gendered experience.
In my own practice I often vacillate between these ideas, as well as those regarding the relevance of visual pleasure or the understanding of time and space within our expanded fields of consciousness. On occasion the work opens into a space of immanence beyond the confines of the master_slave dichotomy. It is these moments that keep me going.
Artist Statement, January 2011
In recent years there have been a number of artists engaged in the process of reassessing the possibilities of abstract painting in response to a culture somewhat hostile to this practice. Painters in particular have faced the challenge of addressing the kind of spaces that have opened up since the demise of the formalist discourse within late modernism. Painting has re-emerged as a practice positioned in relationship to other media, as opposed to existing within its former essentialist lineage. The term ‘abstraction’ can no longer be seen as a definitive label or categorical term. In the wake of this transition, the language of paint can begin to be understood as a polyvocal exploration of time, place, history, culture, and meaning.
In the words of David Ryan:
“The present condition of abstract painting is like an inversion of its valorisation within American modernist formalist thinking. Fragmented, multiple, heterogeneous, without any unified or centralised core of theory or history: this is the topography of what might be referred to as post-formal.”
(Ryan, David. Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Painters. London: Routledge, 2002. p. 3.)
Much recent painting deals in complexity rather than reduction; this may be seen in parallel to a shifting global economy, as well as a technologically hyper-mediated reality. My painting has evolved in tangent to my work in multimedia. The idea of repetition and permutation alludes to both conceptual art movements of the late 1960’s, as well as to the understanding of painting as a handmade representation of the space made available, not in nature, but in technology.
The idea of ritual and process is an important aspect of the work. My process involves hours of taping prior to the application of each layer of paint. This ritualistic practice imposes questions as to the meaning and function of art. The obsessive nature of the process can be seen as symbolic of our relationship and interaction with the tools of technology, as it acts to impose a mediated visual strategy. In recent work I have begun to construct sculptural pieces from the disposed tape. These pieces serve as documentation to my production, with the intention of using this accumulation as a means of alluding to the degraded landscape of a post-industrial society.
As a feminist, issues of authority, gender, beauty, corporeity, and craft have always been present in the making of the work. A possible postgender reading can be seen in simultaneous references to weaving and 'hard-edge' painting. There is an intentional sense of attraction and repulsion at play in the experience of the work. People are often drawn to painting that is more obvious, more naturalistic or organic in nature. It is my intention to challenge these notions, to make paintings that are not about escape or providing answers, but more about posing questions. It is very difficult to address the present moment. Hopefully by engaging with the signifiers of what many have referred to as the current cultural breakdown, one can begin to move forward to imagining a new model.
In the words of David Ryan:
“The present condition of abstract painting is like an inversion of its valorisation within American modernist formalist thinking. Fragmented, multiple, heterogeneous, without any unified or centralised core of theory or history: this is the topography of what might be referred to as post-formal.”
(Ryan, David. Talking Painting: Dialogues with Twelve Contemporary Abstract Painters. London: Routledge, 2002. p. 3.)
Much recent painting deals in complexity rather than reduction; this may be seen in parallel to a shifting global economy, as well as a technologically hyper-mediated reality. My painting has evolved in tangent to my work in multimedia. The idea of repetition and permutation alludes to both conceptual art movements of the late 1960’s, as well as to the understanding of painting as a handmade representation of the space made available, not in nature, but in technology.
The idea of ritual and process is an important aspect of the work. My process involves hours of taping prior to the application of each layer of paint. This ritualistic practice imposes questions as to the meaning and function of art. The obsessive nature of the process can be seen as symbolic of our relationship and interaction with the tools of technology, as it acts to impose a mediated visual strategy. In recent work I have begun to construct sculptural pieces from the disposed tape. These pieces serve as documentation to my production, with the intention of using this accumulation as a means of alluding to the degraded landscape of a post-industrial society.
As a feminist, issues of authority, gender, beauty, corporeity, and craft have always been present in the making of the work. A possible postgender reading can be seen in simultaneous references to weaving and 'hard-edge' painting. There is an intentional sense of attraction and repulsion at play in the experience of the work. People are often drawn to painting that is more obvious, more naturalistic or organic in nature. It is my intention to challenge these notions, to make paintings that are not about escape or providing answers, but more about posing questions. It is very difficult to address the present moment. Hopefully by engaging with the signifiers of what many have referred to as the current cultural breakdown, one can begin to move forward to imagining a new model.
January 2011: New Statement for a New Year
I recently took a break from painting to spend some time assessing the direction of my work. 2010 was a very productive year for me. Some issues that I have struggled with for a long time are beginning to resolve themselves. In writing a new statement, I decided to first analyze my work through a number of dialectics. I considered a Marxist dialectic in terms of the production of my labor as a cultural worker. I realized the importance of my feminist identity and its presence in the work. I reconsidered my formalist training and the necessity to rethink these structures within the context of the present postformal moment. I considered the work and its focus on materiality, as well as its grounding in semiotics, especially within the interplay of the multiple tongues I embody.
I mused on the ongoing dialogue I have had with issues such as beauty and nature. I realize that although the work began as an investigation of my relationship with the natural world, it has evolved into an investigation of the space made available within technology. I remain committed to the idea that beauty and visual pleasure are still possible within the shifting landscape of our mediated visual reality.
I now realize that the many directions I have taken have been necessary for me as a means of responding to and assimilating the time and culture that I experience. The term 'polyvocal' comes to mind as a way of describing the multiple voices that emerge and coalesce within the context of the work.
Elizabeth
I mused on the ongoing dialogue I have had with issues such as beauty and nature. I realize that although the work began as an investigation of my relationship with the natural world, it has evolved into an investigation of the space made available within technology. I remain committed to the idea that beauty and visual pleasure are still possible within the shifting landscape of our mediated visual reality.
I now realize that the many directions I have taken have been necessary for me as a means of responding to and assimilating the time and culture that I experience. The term 'polyvocal' comes to mind as a way of describing the multiple voices that emerge and coalesce within the context of the work.
Elizabeth
