Volitia Turns Herself Inside Out in Order to See the World
Shirley Fiterman Art Center, NYC, 2024
The Shirley Fiterman Art Center has two large galleries connected by a long corridor. I see the exhibition as a series of set pieces, an episodic, reverse wizard-of-oz, color and black & white, swimming pool, skate rink, figure 8, big screen, video game, tunnel of love, cherry blossom, river flow, Buster Keaton, animated xylophone, flip-book adventure.
In my first conversation with Lisa Panzera, we discussed the opportunity of painting on the walls of a gallery as a public endeavor. Instead of pulling back the curtain on opening day, as if the art had arrived by magic, why not think through an installation, by drawing it, in real time.
I have always loved making something happen inside the boundaries of a rectangle. The frame encourages an experience of captured momentum, like an animation cell or film still. Many of my large scale installations have been temporary, created on site, on the occasion of a unique exhibition. The wall and the room become the rectangle.
Something will happen in the making of a public painting, something I have not anticipated, something responsive to the room, the light, the people I encounter, the scale of my marks, the height of the ceiling, the shape of the space and everything that space is asked to do and to hold.
Volitia enters the gallery with a POW! taking on the double role of artist who paints and viewer who sees. In a series of color drawings made of rotating panels, slipping planes, cartoon speed lines and wordless thoughts, Volitia releases her own unseen, unformed, unimagined self into the room. Knocked into play by an irreverent controller, ricocheted through a pinball tunnel, finally tossed out of the frame itself, Volitia remembers how to swim, how to skate, how to look, and how to think. Volitia takes off running.
Photography by Henry Weed and Megan Reilly