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The Dams Have Broken
in-progress acrylic paint and black rubber, 4 ft. by 3 ft |
For this process, I build thick black outlines with the rubber paste on saran wrap and then fill each outline with watery acrylic paint. I then break the outlines and let the liquid pour outwards into each other. I peel these objects up and repeat the steps with a variety of objects. I plan on continuing this process and making an installation of varying densities and clusters of spilling objects.
I was inspired while watching my niece look through a coloring book. When looking at the pages of the book, I was overcome by an emotional reaction to the thick black lines in the book around each object. For me, the lines inspired feelings of isolation, confinement, and loneliness. The black outlines became the bars of cages. I imagined breaking the boundaries and letting liquid pour from the ruptures.
Our society can be viewed as liquid insofar as it prioritizes flexibility and change and has developed fluid understandings of once solid social forms. Likewise, in the arts, edges and limitations of skill, medium, and forms, have spilled over, and, in tandem, new limitations defined. Spills reveal the impossibility of containment and, instead, embrace all things messy, dirty, gory, visceral, and sensual. Artists either lament the failure to control or revel in the messiness. The need to control, the inability to control, and the subsequent loss of control are subject for examination in this exhibition.
Artists may encourage or allow spillage by utilizing chance operations that lead to accidents. For example, the studio floor accumulates spillage and becomes a signal for the ephemera typically outside of the presented work. The viewer may perceive spillage as the artist's mistake; thereby, surmise that they have become privy to the artist's unintentional expression. The image of the cultivated performer breaks down, revealing the human imperfection within the artist's process. While the viewer may understand themselves to be witnessing the un-covering of an artist’s veneer, the spill may also be an example of what Duchamp called “canned chance,” in other words, the fabrication of accidents. The spill plays upon the tension between accident and intention, authenticity and illusion.
Female identity navigates societal pressures of both perfection and imperfection. On one hand, women are told to “embrace imperfections”, while, simultaneously, bombarded by media depictions of perfectly curated feminine bodies and behaviors. The spill becomes a radical expression of an imperfect, messy image of oneself in a society that cultivates perfection. The spill expresses a hunger to explore a vulnerable experience that moves toward hybridity. In a generation increasingly supportive of fluid understandings of identity, the spill becomes a metaphor of the urge to further dissolve identity.
In times of the reinstitution of systems of control and increasing anxiety around psychological, economic, social, and political concerns, spills reflect our inability to keep accidents from happening and our yearning for release. In this manner, spills embody dread and catharsis, evoking emotional responses ranging from slapstick humor to traumatic loss. In relation to each post-spilled world, the artists cope with the loss or revel in the freedom and the viewer is invited to celebrate or mourn. Are spills an apocalyptic collapse or glorious abandonment?
I was inspired while watching my niece look through a coloring book. When looking at the pages of the book, I was overcome by an emotional reaction to the thick black lines in the book around each object. For me, the lines inspired feelings of isolation, confinement, and loneliness. The black outlines became the bars of cages. I imagined breaking the boundaries and letting liquid pour from the ruptures.
Our society can be viewed as liquid insofar as it prioritizes flexibility and change and has developed fluid understandings of once solid social forms. Likewise, in the arts, edges and limitations of skill, medium, and forms, have spilled over, and, in tandem, new limitations defined. Spills reveal the impossibility of containment and, instead, embrace all things messy, dirty, gory, visceral, and sensual. Artists either lament the failure to control or revel in the messiness. The need to control, the inability to control, and the subsequent loss of control are subject for examination in this exhibition.
Artists may encourage or allow spillage by utilizing chance operations that lead to accidents. For example, the studio floor accumulates spillage and becomes a signal for the ephemera typically outside of the presented work. The viewer may perceive spillage as the artist's mistake; thereby, surmise that they have become privy to the artist's unintentional expression. The image of the cultivated performer breaks down, revealing the human imperfection within the artist's process. While the viewer may understand themselves to be witnessing the un-covering of an artist’s veneer, the spill may also be an example of what Duchamp called “canned chance,” in other words, the fabrication of accidents. The spill plays upon the tension between accident and intention, authenticity and illusion.
Female identity navigates societal pressures of both perfection and imperfection. On one hand, women are told to “embrace imperfections”, while, simultaneously, bombarded by media depictions of perfectly curated feminine bodies and behaviors. The spill becomes a radical expression of an imperfect, messy image of oneself in a society that cultivates perfection. The spill expresses a hunger to explore a vulnerable experience that moves toward hybridity. In a generation increasingly supportive of fluid understandings of identity, the spill becomes a metaphor of the urge to further dissolve identity.
In times of the reinstitution of systems of control and increasing anxiety around psychological, economic, social, and political concerns, spills reflect our inability to keep accidents from happening and our yearning for release. In this manner, spills embody dread and catharsis, evoking emotional responses ranging from slapstick humor to traumatic loss. In relation to each post-spilled world, the artists cope with the loss or revel in the freedom and the viewer is invited to celebrate or mourn. Are spills an apocalyptic collapse or glorious abandonment?