Review | In my work I explo...

Generated on 2022-12-15 20:40:17

Result #1

The conceptual and formal language of the artwork is diverse, both in its past and its future.

Result #2

I do not make paintings of paintings. I make paintings of things.

Result #3

The work is in the process of being made. A long-winded narrative is evident. One can only hope that it will be sustained. The artist gives as much voice as the possible to the audience, transcending the identities of artist and observer. The quest for form and meaning has already begun.

Result #4

The work becomes an evidence of art, the most obvious of signs of existence. This is the role of the essayist, a narrator, but not a photographer. Because the role of the essayist is to record and enact, not to give evidence, to the concrete, the real—to record, to capture the process of making. The essayist is the third-person pluralist, the post-cultural operative word, the filmmaker, and the post-structuralist. In this sense, the artist, the artist, and the essayist are like the artist and the self, and like the self, they live in the here and now, but they are in an active, but already past, and always are already mediated by the present.An antiaesthetic form of life is possible only through the mediation of the self. It is not inherent, but must be forged, like the artistic form. In this sense, the artist becomes a participant, a work, a sculpture, a site for the proclamation of the self. The artist is the person who makes the work, who makes it symbolic. It is this kind of personification of the self that is made by the essayist. He/she is a feminist theorist, a sociologist, and a painter. In a world where identity is defined by gender, as is the case for so many artists, this is the only way to remain authentic.

Result #5

In my work I explore the relationship between material, shape, color, gesture and mark-making. These formal explorations potentially speak to relationships with self, each other, and what we call reality. I desire the process of making to be evident at the surface, the repetitive action of my hand apparent. Works reflect through-lines of self, contain the drift and accumulation of time, construct sacred space, bind future and past. Works exist as mementos, recordings, or totems. My job is to activate the materials of memory, divining new runes and visual emergency response. Maximalist tendencies and minimalist desires are strategically negotiated. I seek the tension between blithe rhythms and decay, connected to a lineage of queered and coded abstract language. Visual poems point to the in-between spaces and places, and what is learned there. Ephemeral and continually repurposed, artwork is evidence of existence; vestiges of what was, projections of what may be. In the works of Jan Lucass mezzanine, 1967–68, the artist functions as the dark and quiet voice of nature. For Lucass, the landscape is the landscape of the self. Her landscape is a house. She does not live inside the house, but she is the house, and her art is a place. Lucass self-portrait, 1969, is a self-portrait in a house, and in it she seems to be facing the camera. She stares into a glass of water, hand held to the glass. She is as self-aware as the place she is looking at, and as well as her art is the landscape of self. Lucass work speaks to the ways in which we perceive ourselves, to our self-awareness and self-definition. Here, however, the work is so carefully orchestrated that it becomes almost too much. The sudden, frightening realization that the work is merely a set of conjoined pieces of the self-portrait, and that it is about painting itself, negates the art it pretends to be. However, Lucass self-portrait is not about self-portraiture, and its depiction is not merely a way to make fun of self-portraiture. It is also an ironic and self-reflexive reflection on the problematic relationship between self and world, art and life. Lucass work is not a commentary on art but an analysis of the relationship between self and the world. Her art is a form of self-portraiture, and, like the self, it is about a history of the artist. The self-portrait is an art of memory, about the artists own life and the world, and about self-portraiture. It is self-portraiture that refuses to let us forget that the artist is also the public. The self-portrait is a life-art, an art of recognition and self-obliteration.