1978 Dreams Quotidian

I became intrigued and incorporated the new realist style by fragmenting, combining and juxtaposing images. The encrusted outer coating veils a delicate drama of line and shadow that take place just beneath the surface. Melding of animal and human characteristic, death and ritual. Vaulted themes of post-World War II urbanism, suffused with implications of eroticism and averted eyes convey a mood of resignation and an allegory of alienation Fatigue in the urban society which was largely based on the self –reflexive fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinean fabulist. Animals symbolize both the inviolate self and the unknowable or unapproachable other. I use the dry gamesmanship of Borge’s Pierre Menard, the character that reinvents Don Quixote. I then took on the task of retelling myths.

110.

HINTS SUN TWILIGHT

170.1. PERRY’S ICE CREAM

The very first plant where Perry’s Ice Cream was produced.

185.1. A SPIDER SEWS AT NIGHT

The essence of human character, the transparency of a figure implied deeper consciousness of the self, suspended in air and floating from an inner core.

1979, I collaborated with BILL VIOLA as designer for the installation, ”Moving Stillness” For Dr. Gerald O’Grady, Media Studies Department SUNY at Buffalo.

I designed a twenty-foot pool; a rear projection screen and a variable angle stand for the 200 lb color video projector for projects off the water onto a rear projection screen, which I also designed. Every 30 seconds the image being projected off the reflective water would be broken by a drop of water from a preset lab dropper, connected to a bottle centered over the projection, reflecting onto the rear projection screen. (Bill did the 40- minute tripod mounted videotape of Mt. Rainier.)

(Bill did the 40- minute tripod mounted videotape of Mt. Rainier.) Bill Viola -282 Granada Ave. Long Beach, California 90803 Ph 562-43-9-7616

187.1 RAPE OF CASSANDRA

The work is about the disembodied spirit and the nightmare of free fall. Figures hover at the margins of legibility. I have a fondness for armlike profusion, stained and polished wood, thrusting upward and leftward, ending in a hand or fist that grasps. The painting juggles between figurative and chromatic sensation, the reciprocity that exists between figure and ground, image and process. The distinction between the tangible and ethereal. A vocabulary of shifting edges and interplay among form structure and gesture. A crisscrossing mesh of gazes exists. A physiognomic signifier of posture gesture and expression indicate the quality most potent, in the gaze. The weapon seems to belong to neither, but lies between them in a narrative of social circumstance. I try to occupy the zone in front of the picture plane, which the viewer inhabits. I used red for life- (a sign of an opening of the self and the narrowing of our collective consciousness. Symbolized by the tendency of light waves to shift toward the color with the longest wavelength, red.. Emblematic of the unknown, frozen is the captive unbroken by the intrusion of the eye.

116. BULL’S EYE AND THE MOON

Encaustic and vinyl on wood, 78x62″

Inspired by Delacroix’s great picture with horses emerging from the sea and Duchamp’s E’tant Donne’s, where sleep can simulate death or abandonment. The animals serve as avatars of fate from the behaviorist’s eye in the way of observing the human animal. Based on Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London 1872) a belief that expressions of emotion reveal the unity of humans and their continuity with animals. There is a theme of fatherhood at the moment of metamorphosis from husband to parent. An existentialist expression of postwar angst, translucent blue and white amphora, as lush silver is used to create the illusion of a bottomless pool. In the hues of dawn the form of a nude woman from behind, comes from Matisse's, “LA COIFFURE” 1901. Sitting upper right, her back evokes an odd keyhole-shaped window. Subverted pink becomes the hackneyed indicator of all things feminine. Memories as transparent overlays, as reality blends with what came before and what will follow, acknowledging the limits of human understanding. Whitehead called this “eternal objects,” or “transcendent entities” which are axiomatic. The silver ground recalls the metallic backgrounds of painted screens of the Edo period in Japan. Free association occupies mythic positions. The capacities inherent in the dream, paying homage to a union served by death, as femininity floats, symbolized by running horses, the speed with which death can make its claim. The work was representative so to speak of unchecked carnal appetites.

I use isocephalic overlapping to link equestrian to the human, portraying the totemic.

1. There is an emphasis on social and individual healing, recalling use of books as subject matter and material in art.

2.The danger- Encounters with the sleeping imply opportunity as in “Mercury and Argus “, “Judith and Holofernes” and “Jael and Sisera." The sleeper viscerally evokes the body in all its vulnerability. A delicate atmospheric stain that surrounds the forms distinguishes these paintings.

3.The pleasure- at once antic, caustic and philosophical.

4. The fear- Kafka’s Metamorphosis, whose “hero” awakens one morning to find himself a beetle, the imagery of metamorphosis lends a ferocious prospect of death without faith. Sometimes both figures are female, instead of confirming the distinctness of the two states, by distinction of sex, two phases, but a single existence. Example: Kafkaesque adamantine logic, to read the world differently.

The narrowing of our collective consciousness makes the subconscious.