everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything

This blog title was the title of a really wonderful Douglas Coupland show I saw at the Vancouver Art Gallery. His work addresses Canadian culture, language, and the presence of technology in modern life. He also has a whopping sense of humor. Some of my favorite works are made with what we might call upcycled or recycled materials. This is a foreign concept in northern Canada where everything is used and reused in a variety of ways—it is just business as usual. Go Canada!

Cycladic Secrets in Translation

I made a series of prints at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, over the course of the last year, as studies for larger paintings. They show how capricious memory is since I was at the Metropolitan Museum and looked at the Cycladic figures that inspired them. In my mind they were direct descendants. As artists we do have quite a transformative  imagination.

The Box of Photographs

My grandparent’s generation passed on a cardboard box of photographs filled with images of family members left behind in Poland who perished in the Holocaust, I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I couldn’t throw it out but it seemed like a heavy weight to be their custodian.  Many years later I decided to use these photographs directly in my process of handmade paper.

My figures exist in a theater of recurring images and gestures—that combine and recombine through chance and accident—mimicking the randomness of fate. My process also echoes my own experience with cancer. The news shakes you with that same uncertainty of outcome. These works involve melancholic memory and a sense of loss.

Despite the emphasis on speed in our current culture, I choose to be a maker of physical objects that require slow manual labor. Fibers need to be beaten, pulled from water and couched in layers. With cotton, linen or other plant materials, I engage with the immediacy of working wet into wet as an integral part of my process. I mix pulp, pigments, and photographic fragments.  I blow on dust or ashes, and I shroud or reveal with a translucent skin of abaca, all integrated in the moment the paper is made.

This process allows me to access the past. I consciously capture or undermine the representation of heroic symbols, inverting their meaning by pairing color and gesture to modify the role of these symbols. I intend my work to trigger memories that unite my individual experiences with those that expand beyond me.

 

© susan shaw 2014

Crowd Control and Observation..the High View

Alas..ka

A Sample of new works in Paper

Recently created at Dieu Donné Papermill. Grappling with writing a statement for these works. Please feel free to add your 2 cents, I am still rewriting.

I am a peripheral survivor of the Holocaust.  A cardboard box of photographs passed on to me was filled with images of family members who perished. No one in my family wanted it. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I couldn’t throw it out but it seemed like a weight and responsibility to keep forever. These works in paper involve a melancholic memory and a sense of loss and contain some of those images.

In my works, my figures exist in a handmade theater of recurring images and gestures.  Keeping the repeated images in flux enables discovery. Gestures combine and recombine through chance or accident.  That is an important part of my process—referencing the randomness of fate—who lived, who died.  It also echoes my own experience with cancer.

Despite the current speed and velocity of the world, I choose to be a maker of slow physical objects. Fibers need to be beaten, pulled from water and couched in layers. With cotton, linen or other plant materials such as flax or abaca, I engage with the immediacy of working wet into wet as an integral part of the process. I layer in cotton pulp, pigmented linen, and photographic fragments.  I blow on charcoal or graphite dust, and I shroud or reveal with a translucent skin of abaca, all integrated during the wet.

This process also allows me to access the past, particularly in revisited universal themes and to revisit the collective suffering of the Jewish people. The iconography grows out of the language of the body and from family photographs reinterpreted.  I thus consciously capture or undermine the representation of heroic symbols, inverting the meaning by pairing photographs, color and gesture to modify the role of these symbols.  My work serves to refute the Holocaust deniers and triggers memories that reunite my individual experiences with those that expand beyond me.

Grappeling

Alt. Business

O.K. I am down in the dumps.

I just received my fourth rejection letter this week. I know this business is like being tossed about in the sea but sometimes it would be nice to get some Yee Hahs!

I am reminded of an alt. version of a business plan I made while at New York Foundation for the Art's Boot Camp, seems just as good as the one I made with financials, marketing plan, goals, etc. and a table of contents.  Here it is...and you can barely see the last piece which reads "success"!

I do so love Tom Sachs...

Bella Roma

Comparative objects...

Sibyl says Rome

I'm off to Rome for a month long resinency, departing in two days. I thought this new work seemed symbolic and appropriate. The piece is a work created  entitely on paper using linen and cotton pulps . i think of her as ths Sibyl, dispensing wisdom I don't understand but entirely appropriate for the beginning of a journey. 

pipilotti rist — one of my favorite artists

Andy Confluent

You know about my obsession with Andy Warhol...well, it's gotten stranger and more connected in odd ways than ever.

Now there is a silver Andy monument by Rob Pruitt right outside my window, where I used to see Andy himself everyday coming and going from Interview magazine...and my studio is neighbor to the Silver Factory which was his studio. (For a chronology of Andy and his players)...and now in Andy's honor I always wear the fragrance from Bond No. 9, Silver Factory...


...and last weekend I met a lovely artist, Madelyn Roehrig, who talks to Andy Warhol at his grave and who started filming people at the gravesite talking to Andy...which turned into...a work of art. November 5 at the Warhol—Madelyn Roehrig's Figments: Conversations with Andy: Year I & Year II (2009-11), with live music by Meeting of Important People, Dave Olson, and Uke & Tuba.

Oblique Directions

We're back...NEW NEW NEW

John Kilduff paints while jogging on a treadmill, blends a drink and takes your calls live! NEW NEW NEW media!

It woulda been nice...

It would have been nice if Google's valentine of yesterday had used the opportunity to pay homage to Robert Indiana. Indiana is the artist who first created the famous "LOVE" block. You know, the one that's been riffed on time and time again. Google could have used the opportunity to promote how an artist, and what he/she does can enrich our lives.

At the very least, I hope Google paid him, or that Indiana put it out there for anyone, royalty free etc. to use. Otherwise, he might have to sue them using the Carter Kustera idea of "commercial confusion." ...a whiff of Eau de Litigation in the air, sounds like a modern romance to me.