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LUCY MAKI
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Gallery Talk: Disembodied Objects, 24 October 1992
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I once read that basically what artists are doing is creating their own reality, both as a form of protection and as a form of questioning or challenging. Certainly, "What am I doing?" is a question that always seems to be in my mind, and it often relates to the matter of finding one's place in the universe and of exploring the relationship of one's individual psyche to the collective. For me, being out here in New Mexico intensifies this issue; looking out over miles and miles of desolate land one feels one's solitariness to an extreme. The summer of 1991 I had reached a point in my work where I was feeling a need to make greater contact with the world. My previous painting had been generated solely from the process of free association to lines emerging from the contact of pencil to paper. It was a very introspective process. I was aware that the Spanish painter Joan Miro, who likewise frequently worked from automatic drawing, had done a series of collages and paintings in the 1930s based on objects from ads and sales catalogs. Household items and industrial machines were used to provoke his imagination so that the final result was something more akin to the cave painting of Lascaux and the rhythms of the unconscious than the printed matter of advertising. I leafed through a couple of merchandise catalogs, but the sewing machines and power tools we have now, have such homogeneous shapes and surfaces there's not much to be inspired by. In fact, I found myself becoming very depressed turning these glitzy pages of seemingly endless consumption. I want to interject here, that at the same time I was looking at Miro's work I was reading a novel that was structured around the gesture of a figure, that in my mind had become frozen in time, turned in space, with a hand above the head -- a statue of sorts. I had always associated gesture as a sweeping movement basically linear. Seeing gesture as shape, in this case actually a silhouette frozen in time and carrying a whole history of meaning with it, enough to write a novel, in fact, was a sort of eye-opener for me. Going back to Miro's act of taking contemporary objects with essentially no history, I wondered what would happen if one applied the same process to an object with a history as revealed by some of the most cherished man-made objects. I found myself especially seduced by the surface information of these objects which seemed to be the primary factor in revealing the century they originated and I wondered how one would respond if nothing were left but their basic shape. I decided to blacken out the object so only the shape was left. I selected three kinds of historical objects. These included objects that appeared basically non-objective or abstract in form, such as a stone disk from ancient China, objects loaded with symbolism such as the vase or vessel form, and common objects such as a table and chair. Taking the silhouette of the object I began a sort of meditation on the shape, dissolving it, deconstructing it, and then through the process of free association creating a new image. Late I realized that what was going on could perhaps best be described as a metaphor for alchemy. Alchemy, the doctrine, study and practice of chemistry in the Middle Ages, was chiefly concerned with the transmutation of metals into gold and the finding of a universal remedy for diseases. Carl Jung insists that the experiments of the alchemists had the sole purpose of stimulating the deepest layers of the psyche and of facilitating psychic projections in material things, or in other words, of experiencing material phenomena as symbols which point to a complete theory of the universe and the destiny of the world. The part that interested me was using the imagination to transmute on thing into another. I believe that art is basically philosophical in nature and that painting is mentality, a way to think but in a visual sense. The act of painting becomes a kind of spiritual exercise, a matter of relinquishing one's will so that whatever is there may come to life. This is very difficult because it frequently seems one has preconceived notions of how things should be and expectations. As long as one is in this state one doesn't really see. So it is very important to develop a state of being open. Openness is characteristic of relationships not individuals. In painting it becomes necessary for one to suspend one's certainty and to become willing to have one's thinking influenced by the painting. It is only in this state of openness that one is able to reap the fruits of one's unconscious and to gain access to depths of understanding not accessible otherwise. I think this is true not only in making paintings but everything in life. I also believe there is a correlation between the unconscious and grace which nurtures the spiritual growth of human beings. So in the process of painting, the painting would act on me as I acted on it. A sort of dialogue was set up until the painting reached a point of resolution. I was able to recognize or feel its "sense" although this was not always something I could verbalize. For example, in Horizon, the essential shape for the painting was a Renaissance globe. Staring at the black shape I thought it was strange how a mannequin-like head emerged from the base. I drew a line across the canvas making the separation obvious and it appeared to me as though one were looking out across the horizon. Or perhaps, one was looking through a window, the white being the frame, indicating perspective because there is less on the top edge. The directional lines extending from the edges of the globe alluded to lines one would draw to vanishing points on the horizon, but not quite, as these lines form a star instead. The white circle was left from the beginning, and indicated an indentation on the surface of the globe. I thought it was ironic that it was the horizon that actually generated the globe, staring out into all that endless space, wondering if it ever ended and where it all began. Thus each of the paintings function as a sort of visual poem, the title giving a verbal clue as to what is going on. In conclusion, I decided to call this show "Disembodied Objects" because the subject or content of the paintings seemed to exist somewhere out there beyond materiality in the realm between the conscious and unconscious. The originating objects had been deconstructed and were often referred to by their absence or negative space, and the paintings themselves were objects, whether rectangular or dimensional, that transcended their actuality. Materials. Basically I use oil paint on canvas or linen, in some I have added wax and have made use of the encaustic surface which fuses and bonds the painting into a permanent form. The large paintings are done over stretchers, the small, on wood panels. The three-dimensional elements consist primarily of aluminum plate, wrapped wire, and/or found objects. Whether large or small, all the paintings take a minimum of six weeks each to complete and most of that time is spend looking. Studies exist for some, others were approached directly. |