subversive

At first I didn’t notice Venus holding up a target for Cupid to aim his urine through. I was more interested in the idea of tying drapery to trees to create an interior environment outside and what that meant. And I was taken in by the sensuous rendering of value on the drapery. I barely noticed that Cupid was actually peeing on Venus. And it made me think about something Julie Heffernan said the other day (at Mount Holyoke during an artist talk). She quoted Dave Hickey from his book the Invisible Dragon which I’ll now quote thrice removed: “….’beauty’ functions as the pathos that recommends the logos and ethos of visual argumentation to our attention.” And this is what I love and hate so much about life. Sometimes things are so beautiful and seductive, even people’s words are like candy, but what is ”really there” is almost inaudible, unseeable because its package is so loudly lovely that is subversion scoots by unnoticed like whispers.

See what I mean:

thought

The Victorian frame has a way of sterilizing the content within the confines of its frame. It renders all things pretty with its with its flamboyant ornamental symmetry.  It doesn’t suggest stablity but instead demands it. Therefore, the victorian frame is inherantly directive.

The content here is an image of a bleeding ear. Using a motif established from previous work, it becomes a synecdoche: it is both blood from an injured ear and the bleeding colors of laundry when washed in hot water. Here the body rejects information, symbolically bleeding.

I am pairing personalized violent images with the demanding nature of the victorian frame to depict the wrestling that takes place between an indivdual’s personal inner framework and the exterior framework of society. It is never quite reconciled.

some thoughts for photopolymer printmaking

Guest space

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Some sketchbook images

Confusing and baffling devides over laundry persist with important nuances.

Washing machines good. Dryers bad.

Rethinking Laundry in the 21st Century (translation: liberate yourself from the dryer)

Vatican claims washing machine emanicpated women (translation: be thankful for the liberation the washing machine gave you)

 

Trouble with Sincerity??!!!!

The Many Guises of Sincerity (from ArtLies)

- by Regine Basha -

Sincerity as truth
Sincerity as authenticity
Sincerity as irony
Sincerity as cloak
Sincerity as suspect
Sincerity as satire
Sincerity as pain
Sincerity as failure
Sincerity as violence
Sincerity as revelation
Sincerity as poetics
Sincerity as radical
Sincerity as revolutionary
Sincerity as essence
Sincerity as fakery
Sincerity as directness
Sincerity as leap of faith
Sincerity as crudeness
Sincerity as rawness
Sincerity as trickery
Sincerity as death
Sincerity as generosity
Sincerity as marginality
Sincerity as mirror
Sincerity as narcissism
Sincerity as community
Sincerity as utopia
Sincerity as horror

Fitting that a magazine called ARTL!ES decides to tackle the issue of Sincerity. When editor Anjali Gupta asked me to guest edit the following themed section, I was thrilled at the chance to hunt down this slippery subject, which isn’t really a subject or an “issue” at all but more of a tone. You can hear sincerity or the lack of it. You can recognize it in the way a musical note is played, in the lilt of vocal intonation (like the way some people speak as if each sentence is a question), in gestures (closing your eyes when making a point), in handwritten script (dotting little i’s with curlicues) or the way certain people sign an email (!!!).

(more)

A Weight Hung Between Us

This piece is 5 1/2′ x 8′. The material: sickle, clothesline, wood, pulleys, muslin, latex, gesso, watercolor, paper-mache.

Grammar Lessons/ Chain of Command

Laundry Instructions

This piece is called Laundry Instructions. It is comprised of colonized beekeeping material, encrypted audio transmissions from shortwave radio number counting stations, laundered undershirts, glue, paint and antenna.