The Beauty Of Oil Paints

Forget fine details and complex designs and colours. Begin easy with a mug or an egg, essentially any object with simple lines and curves. Once you get the dangle of it, progress to more difficult concepts with much more colours or more texture.

Acrylic paint is applied with brushes or a palette knife paintings. Buy brushes that are particularly meant for acrylic paints, including a great combine of natural and synthetic bristled brushes. Brush treatment is essential. You can wipe your brushes and fingers on a clean fabric during use, but be sure to clean them completely with chilly drinking water when finished. You will also require a palette on which to combine your paints. There are wooden and plastic palettes, but if you don’t really feel like cleaning up every time, paper palettes are excellent, as you just rip off the top sheet when you’re via with your paints.

The most popular sizes for paint boxes are 12 x 16 and sixteen x twenty inches. The box lid should be grooved to maintain canvas panels of the same size. A box in both of these sizes will serve both for the studio and outside. Paint containers are accessible in wood and metal. Metal ones are more expensive but will last a lifetime, and wood ones already painted or stained price much more than unpainted types.

Retarder is not essential when applying your general wash before you begin painting. This would only include to the size of time it will consider to dry out. When you have portray in locations that you really feel are finished allow the drying retarder to totally dry before moving on to portray nearby. Over-dillution can seep out onto the region you just finished. Big locations that require a wash are very best still left without retarder. Washes flip out much better with a clear gesso rather.

Otherwise, in contrast, it can be a palette knife art, a home knife, or then once more a rag, or a little sponge. We have numerous options open to us. Certainly, it depends on the artist, their style of expressionism in addition to what is in stage of reality used to create it. You also should consider into thought the current disposition of the artist at work.

Once you have all your provides ready with you, you can embark on your project by pouring a small amount of the initial color on leading of the tile you will be utilizing for blending colours. Maintain in mind, a small mound of coloured powder is sufficient to a fantastic extent. Making use of a leonid afremov, you pour 1 fall of oil and one drop of turpentine onto your little pile of colour.

Actually you want to think about varied styles of art furthermore a very decent way of performing this is to perceive from other people at exhibitions in neighborhood libraries, art galleries etc. Neighboring artists show their fashion of work, in their chosen style like portraits for instance or landscape paintings.

The important to effective rice salad is to be inventive. Add finely chopped veggies or fruit and meat, poultry or fish and chill the rice salad till you are prepared to serve it.

ink painting, limited palette

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Graham’s constructions

Most of those who have commented on Graham’s constructions, on his deployment of various architectural elements (and I would consider video among them) invariably make the spectator the focus of their analysis. The very substance of the work – that’s how Donald Kuspit puts it – is the viewing subject, the subject who, like Graham in his little demonstration, in giving him or herself an experience, inscribes him or herself in the work. (5) Critical preoccupation, then, has, for the most part, always lay with the problematic of the subject in its fiction, with – as Graham so aptly demonstrates – the issue of an abyssal separation which, in marking the subject, in dividing it between more than one figure, recalls for it the mortal insufficiency to which its image has condemned it.

Birgit Pelzer, in “Vision in Process” (what might still be one of the finest articles on Graham’s work to date), remarks: “Beyond their declarative immateriality, [the constructions’] presence is entirely dissolved by the spectator’s movements.” “These works are brought into existence by a spectator who is simultaneously absorbed in and distanced from his own ambiguous situation.” (6) Although I support such assessments concerning the question of the subject or the figure, or, as Pelzer points out, the subordination of the architectural elements in the course of one’s movement, one’s “step,” as I would like to put it, where you/it – the subject, but also the work – see yourself/itself “coming-to-pass,” it is precisely these very elements that I wish to emphasize and from an entirely different angle.

I said “coming-to-pass.” I said that rather than saying: “It – the work, or for that matter, the subject – is brought or brings itself to completion.” Like the subject, I do not think that these works can ever be brought, can ever bring themselves to completion.

Doughnuts @Grace

https://ello.co/outpostart

With or without its audience these works will never complete themselves. Thus, even in the absence of the spectator, these works continue in their coming-to-pass; they labour – incessantly – to complete themselves even in your absence.

A cursory glance at any of the graphic or photographic evidence of Graham’s installations should be enough to convince anyone of the importance of the spectator in making these events happen. Indeed, in some instances, the work appears to be on the verge of being overrun by participants of one kind or another. However, tonight, at the risk of overlooking the issue of audience, I have decided, for the purpose of my demonstration, to think of these structures as enclosures which, in opening themselves for inspection, at once, close themselves down. Thus, for the moment, I want to think of them as being sealed – each one like a crypt in a cemetery or a temple, a temple of art perhaps – which calls out to be violated. (7) However, a word of caution: if it is at all possible to enter into a relation with the crypt, a condition which demands an application of violence, a redoubling of the violence that marks the incorporation of the crypt in the first place, it will not be revealed, will not be given to be seen or comprehended in what is still referred to as a presentation. No demonstration, no presentation will have sufficed, here, to show us this place: the “placeless place” of what, at bottom, remains irreplaceable.

What is the “new” in these neologisms?

Within the vast array of phraseology being coined to describe use of the Internet are the names that designate its promise of new kinds of sexual adventure, among them virtual sex, net porn, teledildonics. What is the “new” in these neologisms?

Neonudism is a hypermedia project conceived as a response to this query. It is designed to place viewers, or users in electronic parlance, into a conceptual and aesthetic environment in which they experience a “live” on-line sex scene. The philosophy of Neonudism is premised on eliciting in the user a desire to risk self-exposure, and at the same time it is much concerned with stripping away technological novelty to expose conventions. Neonudism is directed toward cutting through layers of technological mediation in parallel with revealing personal desires – but ironically, through the use of technology.

In Le Grand Verre, Marcel Duchamp showed us La Mariee Mise a Nu par ses celibataires, meme, the ultimate feminine erotic essence without clothes, without a “tool.” She is the key to the desire apparatus of the chocolate-grinding masculine masturbation machine, the fuel for its autoerotic engine. Today people are intensely interested in how the Net might reconfigure or enhance the desiring apparatus, as we see in “teledildonics.” There are two aspects of this that are particularly interesting. One is the constant flow of sex images on the Net ranging from familiar nudie porn pictures to the most specialized fetishes, indicating the unquenchable onanistic desire of the bachelor machine. The other is the adoption of disguises by Net-cruisers, intended to enhance their sense of freedom as they connect with each other in cyberspace. Neonudism purposes that ultimately these features of desire on the Net are apparati that conceal rather than reveal, that clothe rather than denude. (1)

To participate in Neonudism, the user first engages with a constructed audio and visual environment whose underlying premise is “artistic teledelegation.” This refers to a conceptual, visual and auditory strategy that links a viewer of the work to a denuding or self-revealing experience, which here involves a connection to CUSeeMe live two-way erotic video. (2) Teledelegation is the key to penetrating the cloaking layers that block self-disclosure on the Net. It is a representational strategy based on several layers of surrogacy. The top layer of imagery is the point of identification or entry for the viewer — a digital video “self-portrait of the artist,” or at least, a portrait of a self-involved artistic temperament. This portrait is merged into the next layer of teledelegation, an “eye candy” program of self-generating imagery which portrays the inner workings of the machine as having a quasi-organic and visually pleasurable life of its own. (3) The composite of these two elements responds visually and audibly to the moment of self-disclosure, that is, the feeding in of a CUSeeMe image. This recognition transforms the “amateur porn” participants who are present via CUSeeMe into “art nudes,” thus pushing the viewer through the boundary of distinction between experience and art, and between nudity and sexuality.

The first problem in materializing these ideas in a digital image environment is how to portray concealment and, consequently, denuding. Although my work as an artist has always been subjective, personal presence tends to be couched in metaphor and abstraction. There is a longstanding biological metaphor in my visual art practice that links representation itself to the production of subjectivity, to self-reproduction one could say. This metaphor is also a way to have a vicarious and playful participation in species reproduction, which I have not otherwise engaged in. For Neonudism, I wanted to develop an image on screen of a self-absorbed female character who would be my proxy in self-production. She should both hide and reveal my presence as she speaks for me, leading viewers into a CUSeeMe episode with the same mix of curiosity and awkwardness that I feel myself. She is the viewer’s delegate.

In her exploration of a new sex technology, this proxy is engaged in a process of self-knowledge through sex, a search for meaning about sexuality. In fact she should exhibit an excessive attempt to make sense of sexual experience, as an ironic strategy that points to the limits of a Net sex environment. To represent such an excess in thinking and place it into the mouth of my delegate, I couch my own experience in the discursive framework of three well-known philosophers. This is intended to serve a double purpose. These are thinkers whose ideas I have long admired and identified with, and so I want to use Neonudism as a vehicle for their thoughts as they have influenced my thoughts.

But at the same time, the strategy is to be tongue-in-cheek, as if the quotes from their texts are merely footnotes to my own tales of sexual adventure. Through the absorption of ideas from Nietzsche, Bataille and Irigaray as well as quotes from their writings, I want to address what I see as a paradox of Net space, or cyberspace. Immersion in cyberspace entails both a loss of self and an enhancement of self, akin to an intense sex experience. These three writers have each taken up the theme of a complicated interplay between ego fortification and loss, Irigaray and Bataille explicitly in relation to sexuality.

This theoretical level of eroticization is to work in parallel with a loss and gain of identity in the immersive experience of CUSeeMe, which in certain ways results in seeing oneself anew, in a sexualized self-knowledge. The cyber-helmsman that generates the immersive feedback loop is sexual curiosity, directing the experience and keeping it tied to body experience. The theorists’ presence is mitigated by other voices speaking over and around the surrogate’s voice, which is already composed of different personae vying for authenticity. In this layering of identity, the assumption of a voice of intellectual authority by the speaker serves as a layer of concealment covering over the rawness of sexual curiosity. When the surrogate tells stories that ring of firsthand and lived experience, they are therefore enhanced and intensified for the viewer.

Another level of irony and of humour comes forward in imagining participants in a CUSeeMe session discussing dense theory as part of the chat window experience. (4) Although this is not entirely out of the bounds of possibility it certainly is not part of the usual format. The voice of my own script, as it unfolds toward contact with a video feed, overtly admits curosity and anticipation, countering the oblique highbrow talk that opens the session and speaking more directly to potential video participants. And that, after all, is the point. In an environment of live exchange and exposure, two-way contact is what counters paranoid space. In the CUSeeMe clubs, there is a generous acknowledgment and even acceptance of lurkers, those who want to remain invisible to watch and listen. But the idea is to enter, and to engage.

X, Y, Z, and U art show

As live images of the “friends” who participate come in, you watch your own involvement, see yourself on screen as seen by the others present. The effect is not the much discussed disembodiment or virtuality of cyberspace, but a sense of recourse to familiar conventions and thus of a kind of alienation. The conventions are hard to see precisely because of their familiarity and the cloaking effect of a new and, in this case, cumbersome medium. My own response feels both obsessive and distant, alienated desire cut off from its object by the very slow rate of information transmission, or by the reluctance that follows from a surfeit of analytical overlay. It’s hard to say which, but then, I’m a newbie.

Defamiliarization is a key issue. This is a term from the Russian formalist critic Victor Shklovskii, and it means presenting familiar things in such a way that they are experienced again as if for the first time. We are thinking of Duchamp’s subtle insertion of explicitness in his reworking of art nudes, especially his Lovers series of etchings which culminate in an interpretation of Courbet’s Femme a bas blanc (his painting of a woman peeling off her stockings, displaying her sex). Duchamp alerted the viewer to Courbet’s coy voyeuristic intentions by adding a watching bird to the scene. We propose that the unfamiliarity of the Net as an artistic medium can also defamiliarize conventions that appear under its protection.

The Neonude surrogate’s presence on screen also invokes a biological metaphor, as a way to merge the human and machine aspects of the environment. She should be seen as a kind of engulfing female monster who lives in the recesses of electronic space, a swallowing machine. She swallows the video images as they feed in, melts and merges, bursts in a spew of pixels. Biology here implies involvement with human drives, it is biology in the sense that Freud perceived an as yet unexplained bridge between the needs and wants of the body, and those of the psyche. My way of addressing this area is to inhabit an ultra feminine persona who allows me to explore the familiar terrain of my femininity in an unfamiliar way and to portray it as simultaneously very evident and completely elusive. For instance, it permits me to play the role of the submissive, to be disguised by submission so as to penetrate a new surround.

In developing the neonudist delegate, working from my own experience, I wanted to expose more than I usually do about myself while avoiding the simply confessional. Considering aspects of myself that I conceal behind various kinds of masks is like considering experiences forgotten, through time or through more elaborate processes of submerging in the psyche. In assuming the task as an artist to access these recesses of the psyche, there should be no deterrents to following the compulsions of desire and will wherever they lead. I think of French artist Sophie Calle as a preeminent practitioner of such self-exposure. Reading about her video work Double Bind, I experience a shock of recognition. (5) I don’t want Neonudism to be a painful experience for myself or anyone else, frankly admitting desperation and brutalization as Calle does. But her drive to lay bare her psychosexual vulnerability by means of a scenario that she herself has staged is like my own impetus to understand the switching mechanisms between abjection and control, two extreme psychic conditions operating within the same subjectivity, and intimately tied to personal sexual history.

Calle’s work investigates conceptions of the subject that are key to feminist theories and have often been contentious within them. My own long-standing interest in this area has been especially influenced by the French feminist psychoanalyst and philosopher Luce Irigaray, resulting in a scenarization for Neonudism that is an attempt to articulate the place where there is no text — the negative, absence, a place without representation, the lack-of-having (the phallus, and thus subjectivity). At the core of my strategy is the idea of representational surrogacy, or, of representation as surrogacy. Psychoanalytic theory, in the form that it infused the study of representation in the 1980s and shaped the feminist point of view, proposes a subjectivity that is both overdetermined from its earliest stages and yet always in process. This paradox allows the surrogate to be the self that is never solved, and even more importantly, to be a signifier not just for self (presence), but also for not-self (absence). Such a notion is crucial to any project that involves the emergence of dimensions of the self not yet experienced.

This approach to the study of subjectivity enriched enormously the conceptualization of intersubjectivity, the everyday and intimate exchanges that continuously shape the human psyche. At the same time that it examines subjectivity, Neonudism is about the banality that the Net can inflict on intersubjectivity, or let’s say, its imposition of mediated affect compared to the real-life drama that Calle’s work is engaged with and pulls the viewer into. Here I’m referring to the exaggerated promise of electronic erotic connection in a medium such as CUSeeMe, with no intention to deny the new forms of communication that the Net permits. (6) Voyeurism remains voyeurism, in whatever medium. Cyberspace is portrayed as a space of perceptual revolution, especially when it is linked to technological hype such as the Virtual Reality fad. Neonudism seeks to strip bare that apparatus.

Neonudism is an attitude toward technology that is premised on “low tech.” In technoculture we use advanced tools to try to regain a state of nature. VR would be the most visible example: its goal is to make of itself a transparent medium so as to try and simulate consciousness itself. As a potential art form, VR could be seen as the current technolimit of the attempt to reveal the inner self in a linkup between psyches. But VR is more of an imagined than an actual tech; and unless it addresses the massive differences between actual and imagined virtuality, it conceals more than it reveals. We like the idea of wanting to reveal, wanting to access the innermost reaches of the psyche and especially its apparatus of desire. The premise of neonudism is to divest ourselves of the clothing of elaborate tools with a view toward disclosing ourselves as fully as possible. The contradiction is that we require technology to do this, we require teledelegation to link ourselves to the revealing potential of Net sexuality. Our solution is simple technology that exposes itself as a prosthesis of the imagination: the desiring machine itself stripped bare.

The surrogate is sexually charged through the image of her face alone, incessantly verbalizing, suggesting an absorption of the viewer through a hypnotic drone of text into the dematerialized space of the machine. As she speaks an intense, dense and self-involved monologue, she is interrupted and countered by the entry of a CUSeeMe expose. The intention is to suggest that the CUSeeMe encounter is more with self than with others: you don’t really contact anyone else in this medium, rather you experience yourself in a new way, in simulated erotic exchange with others. As pleasure it is a familiar fantasy construction because it circles back into you, the user. But it can entail a metaphoric experience as well, that of splitting off part of yourself and projecting it elsewhere, a sensation of being manipulated electronically and then reabsorbed back into yourself. This could be considered a new territory of fantasy generated within electronic space, into which we thrust the exploratory probe of Neonudism.

Artinbulk’s Art Display Area

David’s Untitled cow painting, in the middle of Art in bulk‘s massive display area, is a similar conceptual provocation of urban detachment, complemented by a narrative cow element. This artist of Gitksan ancestry moved from Vancouver to Montreal in the late 1980s, and has had exhibitions at numerous venues here over the past five years. Many of his cow-based works underline persistent cultural gaps created by the imposition of cow art since the sixteenth century. Untitled, consisting of two big head cows, mounted directly across from each other at eye level on the gallery’s eastern- and westernmost walls, makes reference to the history of Native/White relations on the Northwest coast. Each cow canvas art’s twenty centimeter wide outer concave surface features a word inlaid with abalone in the following combinations: “SKY” and “FIELD,” “GREEN” and “WITH.” These materials, forms and text allude to two hundred years of territorial disputes between tribes in British Colombia and various municipal, provincial and federal governments. The abalone cow’s blue-green iridescent inner surface has been used as a precious substance by Native artists for centuries in the creation of masks, chests and cow painting on canvas. Thus the artist employs the mollusk’s substance and shape as a symbol for communities such as the Gitksan, who have been the custodians of northern coastal territories since time immemorial. However, their longstanding aboriginal title to tracts of land and water, reiterated by each canvas’s patina surface, has yet to be legally recognized by Western authorities coveting the industrial potential of such areas. Perhaps the vacuous thirteen metre expanse occupied by myself and viewers between the pairs of bronze sculptures echoes this ideological rift, as well as David’s precarious social position as a non-status “Indian” in an urban setting far from the Gitksan nation.

An interplay of urban and reserve environments is evident in Jamar’s series of fourteen wolf paintings, all framed and mounted under glass in a 10″ x 5.5′ format. Entitled Indian by Design, these horizontal works are carefully ordered along the entire length of the gallery’s southern wall. Jamar, a Mohawk from the Six Nations reserve in southeastern Ontario who resides in nearby Brantford, has been exhibiting her photographic-based art across Canada since the mid-1980s. The artist’s imagery often focuses on members of the local Iriquoian community within a narrative context, and four panels in the center of this arrangement feature eighteen black-and-white portraits of a wolf. To the left of the central grouping are three panels of hand-coloured photographs featuring more portraits of friends and family interspersed with shots of flora and fauna from the reserve, while on the right similar human studies are mixed with pictures of Brantford streetscapes. Panoramic acrylic on paper paintings of clouds, land, water and fire complete each end of this multi-referential wall piece. The recurring horizontal format of these panels is reminiscent of beaded wampum belts used by Iroquoian peoples during colonial times to mark agreements between aboriginal North American and Western European nations. However, urban symbols such as the image of the Eaton’s department store in Brantford mark the despotic results of late twentieth century capitalism, thus conflicting with the coloured photograph of a turtle which according to Mohawk mythology bears the tree of life on its back. Nevertheless, these social incongruities best describe the trials and tribulations of a vibrant aboriginal North American community, that currently adheres to the values of both locations. Jamar’s ironic perspective on this situation may be indicative of her circumstance as an “Indian” city dweller, who experiences a pronounced level of cultural tension.

Therefore, the most consistent link between the works of HeavyShield, David and Jamar is to be found in their respective explorations of animal art, through a fusion of conceptual and narrative techniques. Unfortunately, the tireless application of racial divisions and compositions forwarded by the curator in her catalogue essay, which at the time of this article had yet to be published, restricts their telling creations to a prejudicial territory. However, I would not suggest that these works are not connected because they evoke the complex geopolitical relationships between the First Nations and Euro-Canadian governments in post-colonial times. The fact that all of them are of aboriginal North American ancestry most definitely determines each artist’s subjectivity, but they do not constitute a superior breed of social commentators as the curator incessently expounds. Such a collective evocation may be more aptly characterized as an art of urban contradiction in the late twentieth century – when the sovereignty of Western doctrines has failed a land shared by many nations.

 

Videotexts

Videotexts is a collection of previously published essays written by Peggy Gale between 1977 and 1994. The articles have been revised and are positioned between a new introduction and afterward. The combination of the systematic development of Gale’s reflections on Canadian video art, and her germane hindsight provide the reader with a perspicacity into this medium’s early evolution.

Rather than furnishing a chronology of video’s development Gale focuses on specific themes. Concepts of narrative, memory and the self are addressed in relation to specific works and artists. These are then situated within the economic, social, technological and aesthetic terrain of Canadian video. Although a theoretical background is apparent, Gale does not lose her subject in the labyrinth of contemporary video theory.

The re-editing that Gale has done notwithstanding, the nature of the articles which comprise Videotexts (the majority of which were written in the mid-eighties), prevent her from considering some of the more contemporary issues within video today. Gale recognizes this inadequacy and tries to reconcile it in her conclusion. Gale should be commended as one of the first critics to write about video art in Canada and as such, Videotexts provides an excellent introduction and raises questions which could serve as the basis for further research. C. S.

Irene F. Whittome

L’exposition d’Irene F. Whittome titree <<Consonance>> comprenait sept oeuvres, soit deux pieces datant de 1976 et cinq autres beaucoup plus recentes, de 1994-1995. Comme le titre, <<Consonance>>, l’indique deja d’entree de jeu, il y a une dimension sonore, musicale, importante rattachee a cette exposition (dont la commissaire fut Joyce Yahouda). De facon precise, explicite, les quatre oeuvres de 1995 font toutes reference au son, a la musique.

Pause; Fermata (1995) presente une Kannon Bouddha en bronze (ou Bouddha feminin), installee sur une sorte de petit chariotsocle, les pieds de la statue comme tels reposant sur trois plaques carrees de verre. Disposes chacun a egale distance de la tete de cette Kannon Bouddha, deux hautparleurs diffusent, a intervalles de seize secondes, des sons de verre qui se brise (soit huit sequences differentes, bien qu’apparentees, de sons de verre brise, reunies en boucle). Ce son de verre surgit, a chaque fois, de maniere abrupte, nous atteint soudainement, nous frappe, nous heurte, nous bouscule, coup de verre cassant, blessant, brutal. Chaque sequence est plutot courte, suivie d’une pause-silence, puis d’autres sons de verre, d’une autre pausesilence, et ainsi de suite, sans fin. (<<Fermata>>, incidemment, signifie pause en musique.)

Il n’y a pas de lien fluide, narratif ou dialectique entre tous ces sons, qui formerait une trame bruitiste, concrete, musicale. Il n’y a pas de dialogue entre les sequences, de continuite de l’une a l’autre, une sorte de suivi acoustique, si on veut. Le son diffuse reste toujours abrupt, soudain, dur, ephemere. Il reste un bruit, un bruit de verre qui se casse, qui se brise sans jamais chercher pour autant a se developper, a se structurer dans le temps, comme une musique a part entiere.

Mais commencons par le commencement et retournons sur nos pas, au tout debut de l’exposition. La premiere oeuvre qu’on aborde d’emblee, qui nous barre la route en quelque sorte et qu’il faut contourner, a pour titre Consonance; Dissonance (1995). Le verre comme materiau-cle est present, au depart, dans cette oeuvre, sous la forme d’une table au plateau de verre trempe et aux pattes de verre souffle. Cette table de verre de Whittome supporte un ensemble de boites en carton, de format identique, recouvertes de platre blanc. Ces boites empilees proprement, a la verticale, forment comme un autel asymetrique, sinon un petit temple avec sourdine integree, en guise d’ouverture. Le verre, d’emblee, s’impose ici comme materiau-cle, incontournable, le verre fragile, cassant par definition, et qui nous communique bien cette idee de precarite, d’ephemere qui soustend toute forme de vie, d’existence (et toute l’exposition de l’artiste ici).

Bien qu’il y ait un aspect dramatique ou theatral au travail de Whittome, il ne faut pas sousestimer, pour autant, son aspect ludique, interactif, son invitation au jeu, a re-creer son oeuvre, a la reinventer. A cet egard, l’immense Clavier en deux sections complementaires qu’elle nous donne a voir, en face-a-face, dans la premiere salle du CIAC, incite a une telle reflexion. De quoi s’agit-il?

Le grand Clavier (1995) vertical, a droite, est constitue de dixneuf longs panneaux de verre trempe, installes en angle contre le mur. Appuyes contre eux, on peut voir, inclines, dix-huit autres panneaux d’encaustique et de bois, de meme taille, auxquels sont integrees, tels de petits tableaux en noir et/ou blanc, des masses rectangulaires toutes de meme dimension, en papier moule, qui representent un peu les touches du Clavier, reposant sur une infrastructure de verre a faire resonner.

Clavier est une oeuvre silencieuse, immobile, paisible, dans l’attente. Elle recele son propre drame. Elle dissimule sa tempete. C’est une oeuvre d’implosion, de violence contenue, etouffee, empechee. Une oeuvre de facade, en apparence. Car on peut facilement passer a cote, n’y voir que beaute esthetique et froideur. Vertige glace. Ce serait la le resultat d’un premier regard trop rapide, d’une premiere lecture. Mais Clavier prend tout son sens vu dans le contexte global de l’exposition, en dialogue avec Pause; Fermata, avec ce double sonorise, audible. Il faut aussi ouir Clavier, mais autrement.

Clavier; Notes (1995), son complement, associe vingt-deux oeufs d’autruche vides positionnes tres haut, en ligne, au mur, a des notes de musique, alors que Contredanse (1995) evoque le corps (la peau, les os), via de vieux sacs de toile suspendus et de longues tiges maigrelettes en bois, sinon en metal (recouvertes, celles-ci, de bandelettes de platre blanc).

Suivent, installes au mur, a l’horizontale, 24 objets entoures de fil metallique (1976), chacun comprenant deux petits rouleaux identiques de papier moule, verticaux et blancs (obtenus d’apres une impression de cordes et ressemblant, eux aussi, a des os), retenus par une mince feuille de papier moule et entoures de fil metallique. En serie, en ligne droite, chaque objet etant ressemblant et different de facture, c’est a la fois simple et depouille, clavier de cordes, clavier d’os, clavier de nerfs a vif, de poussiere en sursis.

Dans le meme espace, on peut voir, sur un autre mur (a gauche, en entrant), l’oeuvre photographique titree Autoportrait (1976). Il s’agit de neuf photographies sepia, toutes differentes mais apparentees, soit trois rangees de trois photographies chacune (sorte de clavier de photos), le tout etant inscrit dans un grand cadre noir (l’equivalent bidimensionnel, peut-etre, ici, d’une caisse de resonnance). Sur chaque photo (prise par Whittome elle-meme), on peut voir la main gauche ficelee de l’artiste, entouree de fil metallique (tout comme pour les 24 objets a proximite). Le corps donc est present via cette main ligotee, dominee, attachee, coincee, prisonniere, en cage. La main-visage, la main qui nous regarde. La main recele deja tout un univers en soi. Elle contient tout, le passe, le present, l’avenir. On la lit, on la regarde, on la choregraphie, on la peint, on la sculpte, on l’ecoute. On s’y voit, on s’y devine, on s’y entend, Tout est dans la main deja, ou presque. Et si on la rattache a la thematique de base de cette exposition nommee <<Consonance>>, si on se rappelle egalement le gigantesque Clavier en introduction, on ne peut pas s’empecher de penser, alors, a toutes ces mains de musiciens (et il n’y a pas de musique sans mains, enfin presque, car la voix est une <<main>> aussi), a toutes ces mains, donc, qui jouent des claviers divers, du piano, du clavecin ou tout autre instrument de cette meme famille.

Curio: Fantaisie-Fantasia-Fancy-Phantasterien (1994) est une installation silencieuse mais on entend, malgre tout, en la regardant in situ, au CIAC, les sons de verre brise, en provenance de l’autre salle adjacente hebergeant Pause; Fermata. On a donc, avec Curio, une tortue placee sur un dictionnaire, lequel repose a son tour sur un piedestal eleve, le tout expose dans un meuble vitre (ou curio). La tortue, la bouche ouverte, semble emettre comme un cri arrete dans le temps. A ses pieds, on peut voir des oeufs d’autruche (de grosses coquilles blanches evidees). Un grand disque de lumiere est egalement projete au mur du fond (une lumiere immaterielle comme la musique, le silence, le vent, l’ecoute).

Ce grand cri de tortue de Curio, on ne l’entend pas de fait. On peut, peut-etre, l’imaginer mais, surtout et avant tout, on le voit, un long cri sur la musique et aussi sur l’art, sur les mots, sur la culture en general, sur les gens par extension, les desherites du systeme, les pauvres, les marginaux, les exploites, les coinces, les bafoues, les violentes de partout, les abuses, les humilies, les immoles, les sacrifies, ici comme ailleurs, au jour le jour, un cri qui appelle la lumiere (ce que suggere peut-etre, deja, la projection circulaire au mur).

Ce cri visuel de tortue, il est donc contenu dans un meuble de verre. C’est un cri a vide, un cri sous verre, un cri etouffe, <<ficele>> comme la main de Whittome auparavant, un cri qu’on regarde et que le son de verre brise de la piece voisine, Pause; Fermata, libere enfin. Le verre vole en eclats et le cri s’echappe. Cette toute derniere oeuvre de 1995, Pause; Fermata, repond ainsi eloquemment a Curio de 1994. Tout fonctionne ici, dans la mise en place de l’artiste, comme si, avec Pause; Fermata, la Kannon Bouddha placee sur sa base, sur son chariot de verre, faisait echo a la tortue de Curio enfermee, quant a elle, dans sa cage vitree.

Quoi qu’il en soit, ce sont deux oeuvres totemiques a leur facon, s’equilibrant l’une l’autre, ayant un caractere sacre aussi, une <<aura>> evoquant des traditions lointaines, ancestrales, remontant tres loin dans le temps. Curio et Pause; Fermata generent, a l’evidence, leur propre theatre et posent a nouveau la grande question de l’existence: Qui sommesnous? Ou allons-nous? D’ou venons-nous? L’enigme donc transposee ici sous forme d’installations ou le jeu du grand Mystere. Vivre, semble nous dire la Kannon Bouddha, la main ouverte tournee vers les autres, vulnerable, ephemere (et comme offerte tout autant au sacrifice qu’a la contemplation), c’est se confronter a ce Mystere, a cette question sans reponse, c’est joindre sa main aussi a celle de l’artiste en un geste d’abandon, d’amitie veritable.

<<Consonance>> est une grande meditation sur un siecle qui finit et sur un autre qui va bientot commencer, sur la mort donc et sur la vie aussi, encore et toujours, et sur le son, ce son omnipresent <<qui est la vie meme>> dit Whittome. Et concernant le son du verre qui se brise, se casse, dans son oeuvre, elle ajoute:

J’y reconnais mes pas, qui sont comme chacune de ces annees ou il fallait que je brise quelque chose pour traverser les differentes etapes de ma vie. Ce n’est pas pour moi un son agressif, mais un murmure, comme les larmes de joie du coureur epuise a la ligne d’arrivee. (Les fiches du CIAC)

Ce <<murmure>>, il nous habite longtemps encore apres notre visite de <<Consonance>>, comme une musique souterraine qui nous accompagne desormais en secret et pour toujours, qui nous aide a vivre un peu mieux chaque jour, un peu plus loin, un peu plus vrai.

Brad Stroman

North Carolina painter, Brad Stroman, brings an unusual sense of abstraction and realism to his art. In Brad’s words, “as a contemporary painter I continually challenge myself to create thought provoking compositions based on our environment.” The acrylic paintings on masonite are highly textural and finely detailed. Brad’s tromp l’oeil technique adds great visual excitement to each painting.

Norma Malerich

Morning Star Gallery takes special pleasure in bringing you the art of Norma Malerich, whose paintings, assemblages, and mixed media wall hangings have graced the gallery walls since 1988. Norma’s creative spirit was cultivated in Italy and Japan where she lived for many years. Ms. Malerich currently divides her time between Ohio and Florida, and paints, paints, paints! Please request photos of her current work at Morning Star Gallery.

 

Greg Osterhaus

The rural south is depicted eloquently and passionately in the oil paintings of Greg Osterhaus. From moody to brilliant, Greg’s use of color affords him unlimited freedom to create on his canvas a world rich with life yet seemingly untouched. “Paintings are as much about the paint as they are about the subject matter,” explains the artist. His impressionistic style invites the viewer in, and allows others to share his vision of the south and it’s inhabitants.

Trena McNabb

“STORY telling is closely analogous to my work. Each painting is actually a connected series of smaller paintings that tell a story…The basic MEDIUM is water-proof, color-fast durable acrylic paint on canvas. The STYLE of much of my paintings employs a technique which allows the un-painted warm canvas to show through the surrounding painted areas to form a unique image. These and vibrant color areas are frequently contrasted with stark white negative spaces..” Trena McNabb