This exhibition is the third iteration of a collaboration that began over a year ago through a series of conversations while driving in New Mexico. These discussions, centered on the peculiar intimacy of sitting side by side rather than face to face, were formalized as “car conversations.” They became a series of audio files exchanged between Guatemala and Dallas, Texas, exploring intimacy, the private and social codes that allow relationships to traverse difficult terrains, physical posture, color, and materials… Of the two interlocutors, the first is an artist in her thirties negotiating personal, social, aesthetic, and cultural spheres. The second is an artist in his sixties, negotiating similar spheres. Both attempt to find a metaphorical, formal, and material territory in which to operate, while remaining tied to their individual histories of creation.
Thought From My Body represents the third manifestation of this work, and it fulfills its purpose most directly. This time, the focus is on the interest in small architectures that house experience, whether in a direct way—simple containers, objects held by hand—or indirectly—the spaces of exhibition, presentation, and costume—both processes tied to the body and its memory, but also to the cultures of production, use, and social exchange. It also investigates the extremes of gesture and representation.
Touch is fleeting, found on a surface where one thing dissolves into another, and the boundary between subject and object is lost. Gesture is the beginning of form, an act that calls for the possibility of renewed commitment—the process of creation. One supports the other.
Over time, a cup remembers what it holds and how it was formed; it can only carry certain things lightly, given its nature, and as we hold the cup, we hold those things too—things we could not sustain without it. A cup is a gesture, but it needs a form. There is an architecture of interior and exterior that meet along its boundary, its material. In this way, simple accessories allow interaction or representation and reinforce the boundaries of their possibilities—a co-evolution of their nature or design and of the nature and design of the representation they enable. A fabric is a second skin (or perhaps the first, the first visible one), again an architecture of the interior, how we feel, and the exterior, how we project ourselves. All architectures, all gestures, are containers of memory—a summation of experiences intuitively cataloged by the body, the body that pursues memory.
In the case of weaving, it is as if the loom were a blank page, allowing the body to write what only it can recall, something inaccessible to the mind.
This attempt to find a metaphorical structure—a dialogue through material, process, act, and gesture—crosses certain boundaries between individual and collaborative identity and will; between how objects and gestures encode aspects of social and intimate behavior; and between object, labor, and presence (compare the work required in Rumpf’s presence, invisible yet strong to touch, versus the napkins, visible in presence but subtle to touch). We have sought extremes, explicitly and implicitly, each taking multiple positions and avoiding roles.
A diagonal division runs through the gallery: at one end, a series of touches between materials that allow a floor to suspend a fabric; at the other, a large object that, through its constitution and gesture, makes a space contain it. How is a form instructed to become, whether through conscious or unconscious acts, or through its particular environment? What is encoded in color, in looseness versus structure and constraint? What is the relationship between gesture (act) and form (sustained act)? These are the axes (among others) repeatedly explored in mounting this exhibition.
Individual and Collaborative Work:
Generally, the most collaborative work in the show involves felt—the raw felt of packing blankets produced in Guatemala and Mexico. From the outset, we decided it was a common, simple material in which we both found comfort.
From this arises a series of reflections on skin, openness, and weaving (which lives through the creation of small openings), more directly addressed by Hellen Ascoli, and a set of contained forms and built structures, more directly addressed by James Sullivan. Drawing serves as diagram, summation, and memory of an act.
There are sections in Beethoven’s later piano pieces—in the Sonatas and the G major Bagatelle—where it seems as though one hand, or voice, reaches beyond the other, touching the extremes of tonal distance while simultaneously emphasizing its connection to the body that unites them. One cannot avoid imagining two voices, separate yet united within a shared body of work.