Ruminations
Sella-Granata Art Gallery
The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
September 8-22, 2022
Artist Talk and Closing Reception: Thursday, September 22, 5 p.m.
Artist Statement
The work in this exhibition developed from a series of drawings I began after teaching in Rome during the summer of 2018. These geometric drawings, made with a variety of erasers, ground pigments, and dyes, referenced the classical geometry that characterizes the artwork and architecture in that city. I showed them as a series in the solo exhibition “Making Room.” Primarily erased circles in meditative fields of typed text or color spoke also to the idea of eclipses, new beginnings. Teachable Moment is a remake of one of these drawings, and by its title suggests the palimpsest of academic substrates, the build-up of knowledge and experiences, and the erasure of past experiences to make room for the new.
The drawings evolved in two directions. One is a series of large-scale oil paintings toward more representational imagery taken from driving over the 24-mile-long Causeway Bridge, which connects the north and south shore of Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans. The second is comprised of eradicated text prints that are heavily reliant on the element of line.
I intend the paintings to be luscious in their fleshy, oil saturated strokes and luminous layers. They recall moments looking out the window of my now-husband’s blue Mustang as he drove me to his apartment on the Northshore when we were first dating. During these drives, I often reflected that I never thought I could be in a loving relationship, especially after extricating myself from ten years of a toxic one.
The typewriter work communicates to me about an inability to communicate, about redaction, and about the whirling thoughts that intrude upon meditative space. Each line overlaps another, much like being “fed lines” (aka a lot of gaslighting). The text, which comes from a short story I wrote, definitions of personally relevant terms from the Oxford English Dictionary, and email correspondence, is illegible even to me for the most part. The words are jumbled memories that recur at a given moment, hitting at times the “pain box,” though not as often as before. High Anxiety ruminates on the way thoughts on mental health literally permeate my brain space.
I took inspiration from 19th century Symbolists, who represented the world they wanted to see and experienced inside themselves; and Romantic landscape painting, with its emphasis on the sky- and land-gazing these painters and writers embraced. “Rumination” refers to “chewing the cud,” a regurgitation of foodstuffs then swallowed and disappeared again, and is a term used by Romantic poets like Whitman and Emerson. The transcendentalism espoused by this movement places emphasis on the divine spirit in nature, which I also find as I ruminate while staring at the moon. At the same time, I allow my ruminative thoughts to pass over me as best I can, much like a passing space station in the sky.