Writing & Theory

Emma Aurelia : Residual Skeins, Morris Fox

“Words cast each by each to weather avowed indisputably, to time. If it should impress, make fossil trace of word, Residue of word, stand as a ruin stands, Simply, as mark Having relinquished itself to time to distance” --Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée, p. 151

I see Emma Aurelia’s exhibition Hold Yourself Together as an impress, a mark or residue of her practice of a voice that is enfolded between boundaries of operations (code work), between the alive and lost, the trace and embodied, between place, language and memory. I find myself reflecting on her work through attempting to define a metaphoric and poetic key, the skein. Skein is measurement is the loosely wound and entwined threads or yarn, it doubles over and over, knotted. The skein with its sounds-like of skin or scheme, intimates at an entangled temporality, and the interconnectivity of memory and tactile traces. A component, a filament, an interlace forming part of a composite or convoluted whole. A fabricated skin, cloth is a decaying vessel.

I look to “a measure arbitrary”, a woven sandbag which through an act of erasure does not quite hold its contents. Grains leak out, yet the container also holds onto its measure of what is needed. This capacity of the porous membrane of cloth/memory/skin(skein) recalls the good-enough, an unpretentious imperfection of the vessel and its leakage. Sand eludes to time, to memory, which slips through the weave. Running counter to mechanization’s command towards a reproducibility or facsimile, fabrication as well, Emma’s hand works as an intermediator of the object that is produced, she situates herself as a displacer, displacing and erasing the trajectory of the programmed rule in favour of vectors of possibilities. The work then elides itself to the process of weaving where the warp and the weft intimates at memory & forgetting, ones and noughts, wave forms, sound waves, the strike of a pedal on the loom, the shuttle back and forth. In “a measure arbitrary” this interweaving of medias and the gaps left for the visitor plays on notions of rustling—both to produce something as needed, and a movement, a rhythm of soft disintegration--a [dis]integer of the source code.

An array of pastel drawings of urns on paper media, “the leaking pot is also full” reminds us of cloths partiality for pattern, repetition, difference. Lines that delineate, the medium that suspends the pigment is like a wax, perhaps recalling a funeral mask. An impression of the mourned, a tactile medium, one that holds, holds onto both the pigment and the image it creates, the objects transmit this mnemonic quality, carrying personal memory through an accretive process, each drawing adding to, complicating and enriching the previous iteration. Emma’s “the leaking pot is also full” acknowledges the slipping of a memory, yet repetition allows her to contain layers of meaning—the literal repetition of her hand creating the work pronounces the mimesis of her own visual practice; an act of both resembling and reassembling the process of commemoration—a feedback loop that is both a sustained note and a form of distortion. Regardless of their form, pattern aesthetics offer modes of wrapping, of embrace, at once expressive and protective, yet always aware of chance failure and dispersal.

Emma Aurelia’s “the day that you died I watered my plants” a shadow-projection of a vessel containing water poetically clenches a silent requiem—grief, memory, a haunting interplay of light and shadow. Here instead of cloth, yet still within a coding capacity, the work creates a space of absent music. I consider the liminal state; it is both out of time and place but marks space and passage. It is a threshold, where the viewer stands waiting to be let in, or where one lingers in a displaced temporality. “the day that you died I watered my plants” resonates precisely because of the uncertainty of state/space it delineates, a soft work ensnaring the present, interlacing the threshold between the past and the future, not the trajectory. Memory, history, us, exists in an intangible hold. We haven’t left and we haven’t arrived. This liminal quality of the shadow projection is a vessel for transformation; everything has the potential to be contained, to lose nothing—this is passage, refuge, a becoming. “the day that you died I watered my plants”, performs, voicing a loss that becomes alive again in the threshold of projected shades. Emma speaks for and with what is lost, the lost speak through her—the vessel is simultaneously empty and filled with captured light.

“...textile artists have learned that emptiness heightens the poignancy of mutable presence. We work our strings, plucking and pausing, purposefully giving the moment away—bringing presence to absence and voice to voicelessness.” --Deborah Valoma (2010) Dust Chronicles, Textile 8:3, 260-268, p. 267

I would like to speak to Aurelia’s motorized piece “a picture of the water”, the way it gyrates—what are the poetics of this machine? The membranes mechanized gesture creates a movement in repeat, or a fall and rise, sometimes in an embrace with each other—towards a legible image and/or a fracturing of meaning. This revolving gesture, a slow flickering threshold between foreground and background, holds a symbolic meaning as well—a limit of memory—implying bodies that are absent, yet are also the water's weight. Emma’s work here is a movement, the scrims/skins passing through upheaval, represent a movement interred with language, marking the punctuation and rhythm of sound/waves, an intertextual gesture forming the silent points between the passages, in absence of the mute impression to re-enact the un-locatable threads of re-collection. As with “a measure arbitrary” where the distressed thread, the gaps and subtractions ([sub]stractions) become the counter structure, the noughts of the intangible (im)possibilities to recollect through and with memories disintegration— striations of a textual geography. “a picture of the water” is a littoral, the washed up on the embankment, a wave forms this an-archive as a white noise machine, a susurrus or whisper of what falls through the gap.

Hold Yourself Together is a displacement from memory and narrative, shuttling between what no longer exists and what is interred there-in. 

Miranda Crabtree : Feelings from a Front Yard , Morris Fox

“You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember. The wild roses flower in the woods. Your hand is torn on the bushes gathering the mulberries and strawberries you refresh yourself with...You know the winter fear when you hear the wolves gathering. But you can remain seated for hours in the tree-tops to await morning. You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent*.”

Silk reacts to light and position, and diffuses the paint application into softness, creating a feeling of levitation. Miranda Crabtree’s new series of silk paintings are connected to and through a line of ecofeminist and feminist artists, (India Flint, Donna Henes, Mary Beth Edelson, Betsy Damon, Betty Beaumont and otherwise), artists who have not received their proper accolades within the patrilinear field of art history. I see her work not so much as a direct engagement or nostalgia of but instead “scouring the past for examples of futurity**”, forming anachronistic dreams within future visioning of a feminist past.

There is something about what happens to organic matter, silk, this tension between and through nature and production, the free-flowing hand of Crabtree in counterpoint to the machined, the “man- made”. Her use of airbrushing techniques folds into and complicates the histories and craft of painting. The airbrush is a term coined by Phoebe Walkup (whose husband developed the patent), who founded the Illinois Art School and taught airbrushing techniques. Airbrushing is known for its industrial and commercial applications, yet here I see Miranda Crabtree disrupting and questioning this association, her methodology is not used for precision, erasure of flaws or enhancing realism, instead it is a form of ablution, precipitation that falls gently onto the silk surface.

“Confined within...utopian, heavenly suspension, plants and women, thus, fulfilled a fantasy in which the passification of the other appears purposeful, justified, and most importantly, beautiful****.”

What are the stakes in placing this body of work within a planthroposcenic***** framework, and enfolded feminist thoughts and botanical empathy? The bleed edges of silk, urban gardens, the wolves that are men, the hidden and what is also in plain view. Miranda Crabtree recalls patches of nature in the city, emotional moods and cultivation and/or wildness within what Timothy Gray would call the urban pastoral. Her work derives from and is suggestive of enduring forms in present tense. Marked by permeable delimitations her sympoesis of visual language is one of co-creative making, her collaborators are plants, ghosts, feelings.

The political-aesthetic landscape of the front lawn, the visible private space, becomes a stamp of visibility, “imaginative fodder” for her dream imagery. Her work is alive, warring for the eyes' attention and complicating how we direct our gaze, the pathways of navigation form a meander instead of having a hierarchical directive.

Partaking in the organizational aesthetics of landscape architectural renderings, plans and plot views, her work reminds me of otherwise systems of depiction outside of linear perspective: the royal garden, the privileged vista, rather finding parallel kinship in non-perspectival landscapes such as quilts, Egyptian garden paintings. She flips the patriarchal and colonialist project of mapping on its head.

I draw kinship to queer and feminist story space as well as the public closet of a front- garden—what Catherine Lord would argue for as “possibilities... to weigh distortion, to register absence, and to follow the flotsam of disappearance. ***”—a type of poetics that draws from Miranda Crabtree’s personal archive as well as the larger possibilities of queer narratives to form present truths out of and within recognizing vanished pasts.

I think of walking spaces, soil as well, nomadic vs sedentary, portability and pot-ability, the access to the garden. Her work is co-responsive, a botanical sensation that works within a sensitivity and kinship to the planthroposcene—a peep into or invitational to her front lawn garden. Crabtree’s inward-looking climate/ecology informs her poetic works that float from the wall, the diffuseness and this levity slip a sensation of being within a dreamworld, a visual reprieve from the ever-presence of danger women face within man-made nature.

“In my secret garden, I still believe after all I still believe and I fall******”

*Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères.
**David Getsy, Introduction to Documents of Contemporary Art: Queer
***Catherine Lord, Their Memory is Playing Tricks on Her: Notes toward a Calligraphy of Rage.
****Giovanni Aoli, Introduction to Botanical Speculations
*****Natasha Myers, From the Anthropocene to the Planthroposcene
******Madonna, Secret Garden

Laura Hudspith : Towards Dolorem Ipsum, Morris Fox

Laura Hudspith’s work does not register as a dichotomy between the artificial, the synthetic, the “real/unreal”. It works instead upon a form of reconfiguration, a once more shaping a togetherness out of the tropes and emptied symbols, the nothing signifiers that spill out of the mouth of the horn (cornucopia), simultaneously absence and abundance. Her work provokes a hybrid viewership, forming conduits to both the virtual and virtuoso–the free-fall of synthetic images that gloss our feed and the conspicuously limitless and looping ouroboros of a starved contemporary art, a culture eating itself. This work is presage, an omen of the transactional lives we are interred in. Her work makes visible the flaw in the infinity mirror, between what is seemingly real and the systems of simulations imposed on us, the infernal trinity of the art object, tastemaker and gallerist.

Her work critiques the current trajectory that renders art as ‘artless’, without definition, or specificity of meaning. She reconfigures the body fragments of the “art world,” figures a once-more, against the current, which is also a concurrence. The material and virtual form of the glyphs appear and are circulated and dispersed in digital fora, emptied of their diegesis. Fighting with/against this particular crisis of material culture, the work is a disturbance to the seemingly endless manoeuvring of matter that simulates and entangles human and artistic labour–the transactables of our desires.

The cornucopia is a symbol of lavish abundance, an unending nourishment. However, one must not forget that the cornucopia is also associated with underworld deities. The feast offered is from and for the dead, an infernal party, or picnic. Fortune favours the damned. The cornucopia is a myth-object–a woman’s body–the broken off horn of the goddess Amaltheia whose body provided abundance and strength to the infantile sky father deity. Hudspith’s work recalls this object of abundance, but it is dried up, providing only a plastic sustenance. While she offers a feast of digital materialism, the objects are also tangible. She calls to mind this ‘lemon’–that the virtual is real, and the real synthetic, reminding us of the co-opted object of our desire, over-pouring and spilling a body of work that critiques something already missing in our visual culture: substance.

Brandon A. Dalmer : Scan.Hack.Process, Morris Fox

“To hack is to abstract. To abstract is to produce the plane upon which different things may enter into relation…whether in the technical, culture or scientific realm.*”

 Brandon Dalmer’s work at first appearance stands up to the criteria of what painting is: it exists on a planar surface, it alludes to three-dimensionality, it shows a mark, a trace of the author of the work, it recognizes its frame. However, there are cyphers left, a key to another layer of meaning, a conceptual framework, invisible collaborations and labour. The works are not what they at first seem, these are not the paintings you are looking for—these manifestations are within a system of change rather than inertia. In a process of collaboration with code-changing and software, a malleability of content is formed, where the artist allows for the work to iterate and abstract, to become something more than the output medium, and in doing so Dalmer himself iterates and abstracts himself as the artist—part of a matrix of production or plane of internal relations and factors that make the works manifest.

 What then are the “source” codes to Dalmer’s work? I wonder about DIY technologies, OSL and open source codes, instructional videos by bro types on YouTube, garage science projects, SETI, NASA scans and imaging of space. The work alludes to these as origin points, serving as guiding constellations in the stellar cartography of the artist. He scans/translates with these sources, and with democratizing technologies to make otherwise invisible worlds seen, translating the virtual into a set of possibilities—hacking.

  I quoted McKenzie Wark’s “Hacker’s Manifesto 2.0.” not as some clever epitaph but as a provocation that is within Dalmer’s work—look outside of the dark mirror of techno-pessimism towards a prism of potential futurities.

*Mckenzie Wark, Hacker’s Manifesto 2.0