This series of paintings documents the evolution of learning about my family from an outsider's perspective on the internet as I search for my identity and origins. Starts by collecting pictures of the family online and archiving figures out of context from pictures. During this process of composing my abstract vocabularies for painting, I find myself letting go of the original narratives and exploring freely between the infinite possibilities.
Nevertheless, they will always remain stereotypical and even comical when I approach them as parents and as sisters, as a role in the family dynamic, and so I will rediscover them as strangers. On the one hand, what people spend on exhibiting online is intimate; on the other hand, such intimacy may be perceived by strangers. I would like to refer to forms found spontaneously by the artist in his resistance to mathematics.
Amy Sillman's The Shape of Shape for MoMa's Artist's Choice series greatly influenced my approach to using form in painting and ultimately inspired my current. Aiming to bring awareness to forms as a subject, a neglected subject in art history, Sillman purchased 71 works from the storage warehouse. These forms become "between"6, between naming and being nothing.
4"MoMA ANNOUNCES LATEST ITERATION OF ARTIST'S CHOICE SERIES, THE SHAPE OF SHAPE, BY AMY SILLMAN," Museum of Modern Art, accessed April 11, 2022.
COLLAGE
I started using these shapes that I had collected as rubble to collaborate with a portrait in a literary sense. Similar to the activity of moving, packing and unpacking moving boxes, arranging objects makes a location feel more familiar. At the same time, collage as an abstract language allows me to transform my sources into paint and in turn construct new meanings as a whole rather than a collection of shapes.
Collage has been widely used as a language of abstraction since the 1900s in response to the Industrial Revolution. Beginning with Cubism, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque deconstructed space into shapes and colors and created a new visualization of reality. I came across David Banash's Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption when doing my research on collage in art history.
He argued that in the boom of mass production and consumer culture, artists developed the strategy of using collage to transform the ready-mades into 'originals'; in other words, converting consumption into production through selection and ordering. The process of putting together a collage more accurately reflects the consumer wandering around a large shopping center, selecting this and then that and bringing it all together in a new arrangement.”8 This can also be translated to modern social media, the patterned behavior of liking and sharing becomes almost automatic. While my forms collect characterized fragments of the family, collage allows an observation from multiple perspectives that mimics three-dimensional reality on a flat surface.
Pixelation of digital photos begins. My understanding of the family portrait begins with color composition. New meanings arise when an image is perceived through the understanding of painted colors. InRegrests(2013) he emphasized the importance of the artist's manipulation and creativity, in parallel with repetitive processes.
8David Banash.Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption(BRILL, 2013), https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.alfred.edu/lib/herr-ebooks/reader.action?docID=1402859 .
PATTERN
The grid in the concept of "innocent", being the continuous act of painting. There were Chinese paintings, African sculptures and Japanese woodwork, along with the same tablecloth and the same curtains that hung over us during our childhood. Patterns are often seen in Art Nouveau or Art Deco along with the use of clean edges.
Sometimes patterns are used for decoration, sometimes they are used in response to the meaning of the images. The main role of patterns in my paintings is to interact with the canvas to create tension. The light thickness brings physicality to the paint and patterns and creates a surreal experience in the distance.
Deciding whether to cover and reveal or force breaks when models are contained within forms. Shirley Kaneda in an interview noted the psychology of modeling as the desirability of consistency and dominance.11 Therefore, when the expected continuation stops suddenly, we are forced to respond to make sense of the behavior. On the other hand, models are often built in the form of grids, one of the basics of abstraction.
Her mixed use of painting and drawing materials to create some such repetitive yet mundane gestures created a therapeutic atmosphere not only for her, but also for the people who invested in the space. For me, the grid is rarely a kind of symbolism, but a simple act of painting. Moments like this, when a clean straight edge meets a hazy background, or when a mark becomes faintly recognizable, provide an entry point into anyone's intimate reading of abstraction.
11David Ryan, “Talking Painting, Interview with Shirley Kaneda New York 1996,” accessed April 11, 2022, http://www.david-ryan.co.uk/ShirleyKaneda.html.
FLUIDITY
The flow of the materials moves and stops in response to folds, wrinkles and smoothings of the canvas. Acrylic, gouache and fabric paint work differently and even more clearly depending on how the canvas has been worked. Acrylic likes to separate from the water and settle in wrinkles on the raw canvas or in small cracks in the gessoed canvas.
Gouache is vibrant and likes to harden, so I like to use it to cover larger areas and to capture the ups and downs of the canvas with a more sculptural context. Light blue is calming, cool blue is intellectual, dark blue is reliable, while a highly saturated ultramarine blue becomes unapproachable.
DISCIPLINE
Bibliography
