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[Read] Just Opening

In 1972 art historian Hubert Damisch concluded his lecture at Cornell: 

“We have been formed by millennia of Judeo-Christianity to look at speech as the beginning of all things. This is precisely what we have to question…For we have been trained by centuries of humanistic culture to look at pictures as illustrative, as derived from speech, from literature, from poetry” 

This series contains twenty-one oil paintings on canvas, where the foundational source material for each painting uses my dreams. Freud determined that dreams and childhood memories were the sole experiences that people universally experienced visual imagery. Upon the foundational dream layer, I intervened with marks based on a reimagined modern English alphabet. The alphabet is not used to describe the work or to act as a meaningful code. The alphabet is a mark making technique, improvisationally applied to the canvas. The mark making gestures the elusiveness of language and difficulty to recreate a dream into language. A tension is felt between the personal pictorial dreamscapes with the invasion and oppressive nature of language structure. When these two planes come together, they clash. Seeing and speaking are at odds. I attempt to reconcile their differences on each canvas. I provide a space for both experiences of communication to not dominate the other. The mark making & dream images dissolve, forming a new pictorial experience. Each painting’s title mirrors the final pictorial experience using the limitations of font characters. For the viewer there is no written reference to understand the work. To know the work is to observe it & connect with the experience of seeing. The series was exhibited at Glass Gallery in Athens, GA in 2022.