Art about Climate Change
One of my favorite pieces, No Postage Necessary, has just been accepted into Studio Montclair’s annual juried exhibition, ViewPoints, at Aljira, A Center for Contemporary Art in Newark.
The show will be in June–please join me at the opening on Saturday, June 11th. I’d love to see you there.
There were over 1,000 entries and only 107 accepted–I’m honored to be one of the 10% chosen this round. I’m also very happy they chose this one because it’s a personal favorite.
What it Means to Me
For me, “No Postage Necessary” is a graphic, non-representational piece about climate change.
The large rectangles reference an urban setting and the unnatural colors, while beautiful to me, also speak to pollution. The simple shapes that create my “city” directly reference sewing patterns (I actually worked for quite a while to recreate that look) because I love the color and lines of those pattern pieces and their instructions and graphic marks feel domestic, personal, and familiar.
I also like to play with the meanings of prosaic phrases we read all the time in our daily lives. “No Postage Necessary” in its white postage stamp rectangle, is very familiar but also kind of invisible or “silent” at the same time–a phrase we know but never hear or say. Here, it has a poetic quality for me–expressing the urgent desire for a response, for acknowledgment.
The backwards text down the center rectangular strip is the opposite type of poetic phrase–public, traditional–it’s a few lines from the christian doxology that have been spoken or sung for hundreds of years by thousands of people. I don’t see it in my mind, I hear it: “As it was in the beginning…world without end…”
I like that back and forth, that tension, between the idea I’m trying to express and the regular life objects and text that express it.
I’m very interested in the challenge of expressing ideas or emotions through purely formal elements and a minimum of marks rather than through a traditional narrative representation. That was my hope here.
What do You Think?
Does my explanation resonate you? Does it change your response to the work? Do you have another response that you like better?
Leave a comment or email me, I’d love to hear it.
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