Before Volitia
Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, CT, 2024
Everyone loves a good origin story. The title of my wall painting for the anniversary exhibition, “Before Volitia,” refers to a moment in time when the questions and ideas that are present in my current work were beginning to form. The opportunity to make a new work, on site, for this exhibition, allows me to fold some past ideas into the present. If it works, “Before Volitia” will contain several experiences of time, excavated from memories, embedded in familiar walls, reaching for something improvised and new, looking backward and forward at the same time.
During my first semester at Wesleyan, there was an exhibition of Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills. The photographs were like nothing I had ever seen, and yet I found them deeply familiar. My strongest memory of the exhibition was a feeling of being compelled by Sherman’s women. Compelled by the space between character and photograph, the captured state of heightened emotion grounded in a continuum of fantasy and culture that had a life, a history and elegance of its own. Somewhere between character and image, the freeze frame and the performance, I was discovering ideas about agency and play.
The women in the pictures represented artists and directors, refracted, changeable projections, both in control and not in control. My idea for my own abstract character would not come until much later, but in retrospect, Sherman’s women were part of it.
A Sol LeWitt wall drawing was installed at Zilkha in 1984. A group of artists followed his instructions in order to create a drawing directly on the wall. I remember noticing that the painting itself took some time to complete. I remember different configurations of installers, at times huddled in conversation and at times at work on the wall. I knew there was a plan to be executed, but I also observed that the entire process felt like a lively thing, full of negotiation and collaboration, rest, consideration, focus and skill.
I was preoccupied at the time with the grid, with primary colors, with serial investigations. I had yet to understand the importance of process and context. It took me a while to wrap my head around the idea that LeWitt, as the artist, set in motion a series of choices and parameters that allowed for a responsive individuality to emerge, that despite the precision of his “instructions, ” the art existed in a specific place and time, dependent on its environment and the hands and minds that made it.
Links: