The landscape genre now encompasses notions of the global, of the imagination and of personal memory and geo-political history. We engage in the mapping of private psychic and cultural experience and layer these with fields of virtual knowledge and more (and less) traditional studio processes and practices. In this way we arrive at a new definition of personal,cultural and geographical identity through an examination of the resulting palimsest constructed of seemingly unrelated bodies of information.
Having been in a state of transition, living in temporary spaces since I departed my permanent home on Vancouver Island in August 1999, I find that my work has allowed me to reflect on this state of "less-than-home-ness", as it relates to "place" and constructs of "self". As well, it has given me a profound understanding of personal displacement and fragmentation of identity based on connections to traditional and metaphorical notions of "home" and all the comfort they imply. The dis-comfort of dis-placement has lead me to engage in a painterly and theoretical investigation of notions of "safety", "homing", and "locating" the self within that experience.
That being said, there has been throughout, an underlying imperative within the process of making the work, to insert a feminist presence and an erotic agency into the formalist dialogue of modernist abstraction.
The "BIGGIRL" exhibition in 2000 represents a sampling of a body of large semiabstract paintings which is ongoing. The titles and visual symbolism in that work reflect my obsession with shifting concepts of place, position, and identity. "Good = Love. Newton's Third Misconstrued Again", with its almost cartoon-like diving board, speaks to attempts to break out of previous perceptions or restrictions in terms of risk taking in many contexts and its "inevitable" consequences. "Home Again In Between or How To Make a Mother Machine", was created in the forest at the Emma Lake invitational artists retreat and reflects the immediate physical landscape. The prairie gull and other bird images in the work symbolize the transitory and transformative nature of the experience of migration between perceived points of nurture, as well as speaking to my own ongoing migration between prairie and ocean. Continually moving back and forth between landscapes one finds oneself not really home in any except within the space of locating. That is, "home" becomes located in the act of "homing", moving "between" and within temporary resting places.
This piece and all other work to date, is also concerned with travel as it pertains to the phenomenon of parallactic points of perception. This "changing the view by changing the point of view" character of movement through space and time, highlights the inevitable accompanying experience of nostalgia and memory, it's tendency to romanticize interpretation, and indeed the need to engage in the act of interpretation itself.
The most recent work, continues to be informed by relationships and landscapes that have filled my experience of and between brief intensely creative times in saskatoon and Emma Lake, Saskatchewan; Drumheller and East Coulee, Alberta; and Victoria, Deep Cove, and Hornby Island and Youbou B.C., Over the last three years. Like the previous larger works, these more modestly scaled pieces use the format of expressive markmaking to reveal a sense of interior dialogue. Direct, aggressive and open in their approach to an automatic, intuitive and gestural process, these narrative fragments offer up pictographic evidence of an imperative to redefine both place, ("Bare New Rhythm" and "In Order To Find The Light...") and privacy/comfort, ("Ma Jouissance" and "Warmearth...") These newer pieces are a natural evolution from the graphic symbolism and seemingly unpremeditated, childlike scrawl that characterizes much of the previous work, and which is central to the unrelenting insistence of expression that all this work embodies.
As a body, these paintings function as parenthetical documents: not the actual landscape but a sort of annotation without location, or a collection of footnotes without context. They are land-scape without landedness or indeed, land. They might also be construed as documentation of the conversations of the concurrent and multi sensory activities of locating,mapping and searching. A collection of photo-lingual snapshots or visual sound-bytes that reflect a search for some illusory "center" or "home", these pieces become preciously fetishistic, ritualistic, textual objects whose half formed sentences and pictorial mathematics are boldly self-reflexive, emanating from a center of heated subjectivity, yet never ambivalent to the social world.
I feel a strong impetus at this point in time to become a collector of odd objects and images from dried leaves to childrens stickers and dated fabrics; from old books and instruction manuals to to industrial materials such as metal roofing and rubber pond lining. These materials and images are all somehow related to the varying personal and actual locations I have inhabited. For instance the small antique toy cars situated atop some of the paintings were found in a recycling barrel during an April housesitting sojourn on Hornby Island and some of the linoleum was given to me by a collegue at Emma Lake. I sense them as simply an extended language, additional layers of information in the mapping process that will be added to an already familiar archive of abstract painterly signs and symbols. This new development has natually lead to the evolution of a new body of work. These are a series of small to medium scaled diptychs and triptychs in mixed media and assemblage. If you're looking for me in the next few months I'll be out in the wide conceptual field of "Location/Locating".
Namaste
Caroline - May 2003
|
