October 28 and paper

I just had a terrific session with Heidi.
I showed her my work which, sadly, does not translate well to photography (above)

She remarked on how this work felt like I was onto something- that she has that sense because she can look at my oldest work that I have in my studio - watercolors from 15 (more?) years ago - and can see this work is directly related.

It felt very right. I'm working with my silk, with rich colors and it has an element of fun and unpredictability. I'm going to expand all this~

I am also posting here my paper, which was about how I see and how that plays into my art:

Salley Knight

Professor Julia Scher

Personal Essay – Group 1

October 2009

Personal Vision

How did I see the world in the first years of my life? How does that bear on the art I do now? Those questions have been with me for years. I had a story about my eyes: I was born with poor muscular control of my eyes and therefore my sight was blurry. I had a condition called strabismus. My eyes wandered inward and outward. I do not remember what that was like for me. What I do remember is the startling clarity of my first scene after the corrective operation: boats on the Charles River. The sharpness of that image stood out for me, so I assumed that my earlier vision must have been blurry.

When I searched “strabismus” I found a scientific description of the condition. A.D.A.M. defines strabismus as “…a disorder in which the eyes do not line up in the same direction when focusing. Strabismus is caused by a lack of coordination between the eyes. As a result, the eyes look in different directions and do not focus at the same time on a single point…. the cause is unknown…”

I also found a lead to a recent book, Fixing My Gaze, by Susan Barry, a neurobiologist who, like me, had been diagnosed with childhood strabismus. I related to her experience when she discovered at age 20 that she did not have stereovision or stereopsis, the ability to see out of both eyes at once. Similarly, I had no idea that I had only limited ability to see 3D until age 45, when my son was tested and I could see 3D only the first few sets on the test card. I was told then that the ability to see 3D was related to eye-brain development, learned in a child’s first 5 or 7 years, and that after that critical period, the brain was set. I was now fascinated to read that Susan Barry, as a neurobiologist, chose to investigate that idea, and at age 48, after intensive vision therapy, her brain had responded and she was startled by her first experiences of 3D vision.

Through Susan Barry’s explanations of how the eye and brain work together and descriptions of her experience, I came to realize that the story I had told myself about my early years was inaccurate. Instead of seeing blurry images, which is what I see when I cross my eyes now, I then saw flat images. Barry writes about what happens with strabismus:

Since my eyes were not straight and saw different things, the binocular neurons in my brain received conflicting input. This situation set up a competition between my two eyes, and for each neuron, one or the other eye won out. Each neuron in my brain now responded to input from only one eye. This change most likely happened in the first year of my life…(11)

In my early years my world must have appeared flat. It would not have felt strange because I never knew a different way of seeing. However, it did shape my experiences. It was more difficult to be among a group of unpredictably fast moving classmates. So, as a small child, I remember I would separate myself out in the pandemonium of recess. I could not figure out how to join the fast, furious play. It felt more comfortable to watch. I became a witness: they were on one plane while I was on another. I remember as a small child when the teacher asked me why I was not playing; I did not know at the time but now it all makes sense. I was soothed to read that Susan Barry reported the same feeling as a child: that she was in a separate world, watching.

So, did I not experience 3D at all? I did not have stereovision. However, I could judge where something was relative to something else by shadows or obstruction of view; and I could sense distance as I moved through it. As I grew older, recess activity turned to organized games and I could easily join with the help of structure. With the focus on the ball, players moved in relationship to it: I could judge distances and understand the space.

I lacked stereovision – without realizing it, I was only seeing the world as flat. How did I understand a 3D world? I was fascinated to realize that this same dilemma is part of artists’ challenges as well. In her book, Vision and Art, the Biology of Seeing, Margaret Livingstone describes how artists, in particular painters, attempted to achieve 3D effects.

Livingstone points out that perhaps the first person to make note of this issue was Leonardo Da Vinci who she quotes:

It is impossible that a painting, even in which the outlines, shade, light, and color are copied to the highest perfection, can appear with the same relief as a real object in nature, unless this natural object is looked at over a long distance and with a single eye (140).

For a period of time in the18th and 19^th centuries, viewers were asked to look through a small hole in a curtain to view paintings in order to achieve the 3D effect in this way (140).

Livingstone credits the Impressionists with discovering another way to suggest depth: blurriness. By avoiding sharp lines of contrast, the two separate eyes do not have the same clear edges to focus on and to interpret flatness of the painting surface. Due to the fact that the painting itself does not read as flat, the other indicators such as shading and perspective feel stronger (143).

According to Livingstone, the Impressionists and post-Impressionists also found another means of suggesting 3D. By using repetition, such as of leaves for foliage, tiny dots for atmosphere, they could fool the eyes. Repetition over a large area meant that one eye could not settle and choose one image to match with the other eye. Livingstone explains it in this way:

When we view a three-dimensional scene, objects in front or behind the plane of fixation cast images on non-corresponding points of the two retinas. The brain must decide which images in the right retina …(to) match with images in the left. Usually the brain is correct in settling on the most parsimonious explanation. Repeated patterns, however, …confuse the matching process, since the several explanations may be equally valid, and this creates an illusion of depth (146).

What fascinates me about these three artistic means for creating depth that Livingstone mentions is that they all are vividly part of my experience. Long distance viewing – perhaps least important to my art- has always come easily to me. However, my attraction to blurriness has been a strong characteristic of my work. For example, in the body of work I created to submit to AIB, I used layers of translucent silk but I never cut the edges because the shredded edges gave a soft line- a blur. The numerous lines and edges, even the tiniest pieces of color all had to have these blurry edges. The pieces of dried plant were often obscured by the silk that softened their outline, and the application of paint on the frames was loose and blended. Moreover, repetition was apparent throughout this work. I tended to invoke a loose reference to the grid, using many smaller squares. Plant material comes in with lines or spirals one after another. I noticed that the motif of repetition came up, but I wasn’t sure why. It makes sense now – that I was seeking visual dimension that was otherwise missing for me. Recently, I created embroideries of various images of lines of children, which seemed to be an abrupt departure from my previous abstract work. What I loved about the finished images was the information available from the very blurry line, and that there were repeated images, with slight variations. I had wondered about those pieces after they were done. Why was I doing illustration? In fact, I believe, I was exploring the themes that have attracted me over and over again- the blur, the repetition.

Furthermore, I now see why certain other artists intrigue me. I refer to Jessica Stockholder, who claims that she works in 2D that happens to be 3D ( qtd. in Carruthers, et al, 17-18) and to Richard Tuttle, whose 20 Floor Drawings in Amsterdam, 1988 (ICA Amsterdam, 8-48)) look like sculptures. Both of these artists are playing with the interplay between 2D and 3D in a way that I relate to intuitively.

When I set out to write this paper, I expected I would be describing my experience of blurriness in early childhood and how that recurs in my work. I had not realized that I didn’t see blurs as a child, but that I was living in a 2D world. Nor did I realize how that has informed my work ever since – that the shifts in my vision that have affected me so profoundly continue to be a driving force in my understanding the art that attracts me and the art I endeavor to create.

Works Cited

A.D.A.M., Strabismus: Overview, Treatment, Symptoms, Causes. Google Health, Google.com /health, n.d., Web. 15 October 2009.

Barry, Susan, Fixing My Gaze: A Scientists’ Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions, New York: Perseus: 2009, Print.

Booth, Jenny, Susan Barry, ww.week.com, n.d. Web. 15 October 2009

Carruthers, Elspeth, et al, Jessica Stockholder: Kissing the Wall, Houston: Blaffer Gallery, 2004, Print.

ICA /Amsterdam, Richard Tuttle, The Hague: Sdu Publishers, 1991, Print.

Livingstone, Margaret, Vision and Art: the biology of seeing, New York:

Harry N. Abrams, 2002, Print.

I heard Bill Irwin speak last Thursday and Janet Echelman this Wednesday. Irwin was brilliant and spoke to the question of what is art? That it is the task of each generation to answer for themselves... and then went on to describe his definition: artist is first in relationship to all that is/the endless possibility. He/she asks his/her question and has the job then of finding the tools, the means to create a response. This then gets shared with others - artists, then general public - then culture - finally, history. But all are present all the time, inseparable: possibility, artist, culture and history. Janet Echelman was less verbal. However her work was impressive: huge sky born sculpture. She began as a textile artist, so it was of particular interest to me - that she has found a way to work so large and outdoors, too.
The photos are of my tiny work. In my mind I am exploring ideas that I might make large. I also am exploring color and ways that the silk self-supports. In the first 2, I am playing the red and yellows against the varying greys.

morphing of the cubes

Just playing - adding, squishing, grouping.

cubes

I spent the last while dying silk in shades of gray. I wanted to have the grey as contrast to my saturated colors of previously dyed silks that I have on hand. However, the grey itself attracted me. I wanted to see how I could filter it through the gauze, so I used red embroidery thread to sew cubes with one side solid grey silk and the other sides undyed organza . However, once the cubes were complete, the shades of grey were so muted that they were tough to differentiate. Therefore I decided to remove the "lid", at which point the greys seemed to shine. The silk puffed up in a soft way that seemed to add to its allure, especially as it played off the relatively stiff sides of the boxes.

Salley Knight
Professor Julia Scher
Comparison of 2 pieces of art – Group 1
October, 2009

Comparing Richard Tuttle’s The Last Light Work”
to Jessica Stockholder’s Untitled, (1993)

I am keenly interested in two artists: Richard Tuttle and Jessica Stockholder. For the purposes of this paper, I chose to compare a work by each artist that was created in the early 90s. Specifically, I am interested in how they address the issue of “frame”. Neither artist uses a frame in these pieces, but the idea is present.
Richard Tuttle’s piece, The Last Light Work (Grynsztejn 308) is actually mounted on the wall, which is not true for all his work. It is also hung at viewing level, which he also plays with in other pieces. In fact the main body of this piece is a rectangular piece of plywood attached to the wall. This 20 x 30 inch piece of red painted wood even has narrow strips of bare plywood along the top and bottom of the rectangular base, as well as another strip attached vertically about 2 inches in along the left border – all echoing the stance of a framed piece.
From there, the nod to tradition ends. On the front of the plywood base is attached another red painted rectangle made of cardboard shaped to form regular sections, then sliced in strips. This other red rectangle is mounted askew – so that its corners protrude to either side of the formally hung base. Furthermore, a wire from the twinkling Christmas lights, loosely draped beneath the top strip of bare plywood, extends down to a socket – into which there are two bright narrow 5 inch white lights mounted side by side. They are parallel, but one is distinctly higher than the other. It feels like Tuttle is echoing the traditional by placing them both upright, and then upsetting it again by their uneven horizontal relationship.
Jessica Stockholder’s unnamed piece, created in 1993 (Carruthers 49), is composed of a simple square white plastic sink basin mounted vertically on aluminum tubing. It’s as if she were displaying a painting – very upright. In fact, she does treat the piece as a painting – adding a yellow square of color onto the left of the sink. The yellow might even be a play on the idea of light that is emitted by a small light fixture sitting on the bottom edge of the sink. The yellow paint adjoins a beautiful fleshy pink that runs along the left rim of the sink, then onto the aluminum pole and outward onto an upright wooden board and a toolbox mounted sideways onto the pole. At the base of the piece is a coil of orange extension cord, mirroring the color of the toolbox. This cord connects to a black wire which rises up to the toolbox where the color black is painted across the left side of the toolbox, meeting the fleshy pink, but leaving the orange to show on the rough edges above and below. To offset the soft pink area, the front aluminum pole is painted a distinct basic blue, echoed in the wooden board behind it.
Both Tuttle and Stockholder use every day materials in their work. Tuttle’s materials could have all come from a hardware store. In this piece, Stockholder’s could have as well. Therefore, “the white cube” of the gallery, the exhibition space, also defines the work as art and “frames” it in the gallery setting by separating the works from structures for which that these materials might otherwise be used.
Jessica Stockholder (qtd. in Carruthers, et al) says,” My work assumes a white cube…” (11), while Madeleine Grynsztejn writes about Tuttle, “ the architectural container…provide(s) a “frame” and pivotal counterpoint to the works themselves.” (43)
However, each artist considers his or her idea of frame from a unique vantage point. In his piece, Tuttle uses geometry to violate the boundaries of the frame. Stockholder uses color to create pieces of pictorial formality that stand complete as if framed.
Tuttle rose to fame in the 1970s when Grynsztejn reports that many artists began to question the use of the frame (43). Among Tuttle’s first pieces were large shaped pieces of cloth that he pinned to the wall? Over the years, he has hung works near the floor, placed them apart from the wall, created them on the wall, and even re-introduced the frame, and then gone on to play with where and how the frame interacts with other parts of the piece. What Tuttle is doing in his work is questioning the dominance of how the audience sees art because of Renaissance easel painting. Grynsztejn describes it thus:
So successful was this vehicle (the Renaissance easel painting) as a form of making the world understandable…that Western culture has adapted the flat picture plane as a visual tool for all manner of…intellectual cognition, from the view out the car window …to the way we structure our inner consciousness…It is Tuttle’s ambition to create works that confound inherited ideas about what constitutes a picture plane… and to undermine its primacy (59).
In his piece, The Last Light Work, I sense that Tuttle does suggest a frame by his use of thin border strips of plywood, but the “painting” (cardboard rectangle) ignores its parameters. The lights, which in the earlier part of the last century would have been mounted to shine on the painting, are in the piece itself as well as wandering far afield, to add their own artistic statement below the attached plywood and cardboard. Tuttle comes close to the traditional picture plane, but I think he does so only in order to play with expectations and then ignore them.
Stockholder comes from a different stance. She began as a painter and continues to consider her work as paintings, which also happen to be sculptures. She says “…the gesture of placing an object in a room is not so far removed from making a gesture with a brush” (13). According to Elspeth Carruthers:
Stockholder’s work-form is strictly speaking- the picture…Her works, which can include the wall, the floor, free space, can be described at painting in the third dimension. Stockholder’s retains and profits from pictorial concepts of the abstract Modern… and is a plea for composition, rhythm, beauty…(26-27).
The lack of a formal frame in Stockholder’s work does not imply that she is refuting the concept of frame. I sense she is actually asking the viewer to find the frame in different materials: the side of the sink, and/or the edge of the aluminum supports. Once the viewer adjusts to seeing the sculpture as a painting, the colors and shapes are beautifully composed. By making the work three dimensional, it also makes me, the viewer, aware of my three dimensionality, as well.
Stockholder also uses light as a color. Like Tuttle, she includes the fixture in the piece. However, again, I think she uses the fixture for one purpose, namely, color: of the fixture, the light it emits, and the concept of the light (as symbolized by the yellow square). She includes the use of light fixture as part of the formal abstract “painting” she creates.
Richard Tuttle and Jessica Stockholder, both in the forefront of the post- Minimalist art scene in the 1990’s, created works that occasionally had similar aspects. In the 2 pieces I chose to compare for this paper, both are working with the concept of frame in untraditional ways. The appearances of the pieces – use of common materials, inclusion of light fixtures, lack of traditional frame – might suggest that they shared ideas about framing. Other than the fact that both relied on the space of the gallery to set their work apart as art, I have concluded that each artist approached their work from a personal orientation, which informed their decisions about the idea of frame: Tuttle was primarily interested in challenging the viewers concepts and expectations of the flat picture plane; Stockholder was blurring boundaries between surface and structure, so that the color defined her work, including the concept of frame.













Works Cited

Carruthers, Elspeth, et al, Jessica Stockholder: Kissing the Wall, Houston: Blaffer Gallery, 2004, Print.

Leinz, Gottleib, et al, Jessica Stockholder, Dusseldorf :Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, 2002. Print.

Grynsztejn, Madeleine, The Art of Richard Tuttle, San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 2005.Print.

September 29, 2009

I just met with Heidi.
At the beginning of September, I had working on the Jessica Stockholder's miniatures. Even though I had made one small embroidery of children all lined up...I was surprised when I did another by how much I was intrigued by this aberrant line that the thread made on the fine silk. I have always been intrigued by the look and the idea of children lining up - that that is the first thing that is taught in school, and all the rest of school really, in some sense is about that (or in reaction to it). It was not that big a leap to cows lining up - which is what I looked at in my young years.
I then placed 3 year old me in the background - behind the cows.
Actually, the idea for hanging the piece so that the image of me seen through the cows came out of my session with Heidi. I had been playing with using common translucent plastic containers as supports for the work. Heidi suggested I put the support concern aside and really just focus on the idea(s) that I'm after. She suggested drawing and journaling to get clear ahead of time about the subject matter, especially because the embroidery is so very time-consuming.
I feel somewhat skeptical, but I'll explore that avenue. In the past, I notice that I tend to find my way by touch rather than by word or idea. It sometimes has felt like my brain can go one way, but my art is going to take me where it does. I haven't done a lot of writing specifically about my art lately though. And when I did "illustrative" art before, I did do a lot of intensive drawing in preparation.
Finally, we discussed my 2 very different directions. Heidi had just seen my show and was looking at art work on my wall and commented that it was really about color (and plants and/or spirals). She suggested that I keep that up - that I pursue both the embroidery and the color, keep both going.

After meeting with Heidi on Sept. 1, I took her advice and began to create miniature copies of Jessica Stockholder's work. I know that Europeans learn by copying the masters, but it has felt so odd for me to actually attempt to re-make her work, small.
In fact, it has been quite a educational and challenging experience - just realizing the color detail and amount of materials she uses. It also has made me hungry to do my own work. Now that I've done 3 "Stockholders," I think I'll venture into my own materials and color, hoping that I've gained some wisdom from looking so closely at her work. I've posted photos of the miniatures (sideways again. sorry)