Amorphous and Marking Lines: Transforming Medium into ‘Other’

And must there not be some art which will affect conversion in the easiest and quickest manner; not implanting the faculty of sight, for that exists already, but has been turned in the wrong direction and is looking away from the truth?

—Plato, Allegory of the Cave

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of finger or finger at the tip of my words.

—Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments    

For me, creating work is about my experiences and what I take in.  Every artist finds a point in her own work where she finally has to call it quits and present it to her community. It’s frustrating when we think a piece is done but then we realize that it is still a work in progress. It’s an intimate act when an artist puts paintbrush to canvas, but it becomes an even more intimate act when we start mixing mediums. As a visual artist, I try to integrate one material with another that might not fit or belong together. When we work with our hands, there is always a probability of failure. Most artists accept failure as a challenge, as a starting point for an art object that is worthy of its creator and its spectators, for a work to be acknowledged that has captured a moment with perfect clarity, abstracted language and that has communicated a message. 

Think of a cave where three prisoners are chained and bound and made to face a wall, which is the only object they can see along with a flickering shadow from a flame that shows a walkway with others passing along it. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, an excerpt from his fourth century BCE political writing The Republic about human perception and how we gain knowledge from our senses, has helped me to explain how, after creating my pieces, I locate myself within a consciousness of tension—not by looking down but by looking up and not running away from the anxiety and (il)legibility of myself within my own work. The organized chaos that is involved in creating work but then the self-discovery when I finally understood how the work, like my own life story, came to be from within a heavily demarcated space. Finally, Plato’s Allegory also helps me to understand and explore in my own work the anxiety of becoming aware of the conscious world.

I grew up in a neither/nor world that cannot be stereotyped as a typically “white American childhood.” I was born in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, and when I turned three, we moved back to Mahomet, Illinois in the American Midwest. After three years, we moved to Santiago, the capital city of Chile. Then, when I was eight, we moved to Abu Dhabi of the United Arab Emirates. When I was nine, my parents decided that they would homeschool my sister and me for a year while our family backpacked around Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand. During that year, my parents learned that they both had gotten jobs in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam where we spent the next six years. Then, when I turned seventeen, during my last two years of high school, we relocated to Amman, Jordan. For the last two years of my life, I have been living here in Boston, Massachusetts. So, when I share this long answer to “where are you from?” I always feel like I disrupt other people’s ‘norm’ of what they expect me to be because it no longer fits within the usual frame of the American kid who looks like me. Some have tried to describe those of us who spent our childhoods everywhere with “Cross-Cultural Kid” or “Third Culture Kid”, but these phrases never seem to fully describe who I am or the experiences that I have had. In other words, I am the space that fills the six degrees of separation, the bridge that aligns communities while adding to the tension in my and everyone else’s everyday life—like my work. Demarcation, anxiety (de)construction, (il)legibility and mobility are the concepts that help me to explain the tension in my work created by line, shape and color as I imagine it is experienced by viewers.

 Amorphous, a multidisciplinary sculpture on canvas, is marked by vertical lines that form an oblong-shaped figure in tones of black and grey with three-dimensional ceramic objects varying between black/white/brown paint with a pinkish tinge. In Marking Lines, two canvases merge together with acrylic black and white gesso that is toned and tinted with hatch marks made with white and black oil-based marker.  Read from left to right, amorphous forms appear from a series of cutouts that vary in size and shape including square, rectangular and asymmetrical circular patterns. Read from top of the canvas to the bottom, the eye is led from light to dark and then from side to side to the center where there is a slight divot that allows for a transition where the cutouts figure less and less. Finally, the eyes come to rest on a space where there are only hatch marks and various tones of greys, whites and blacks.

My own work like that of multimedia artist Sarah Sze works within the bounds of an organized chaos—both appear chaotic while having enough order to be ‘read’ as coherent by viewers. Like Amorphous and Marking Lines, Sze’s mixed-media installation Everything That Rises Must Converge allows the viewer to discover unifying connections among elements—line, color and texture—in spite of the work’s focused tension between viewers’ everyday expectations for the objects included in the pieces and the way that both Sze and I repurpose them.  As art journalist Marty Carlock observes in Sculpture, “From an initial impression of chaos, [Sze] instinctively organizes a composition in which the viewers can lose themselves, tracing the threads of unity. Hidden behind incoherence and ostensible disorder is a classic formality.” I feel very strongly that’s what is happening in my work as well.

I, say, they had been released from these impediments and turned in the opposite direction, the very same faculty in them would have seen the truth as keenly as they see what their eyes are turned to now. 

—Plato, Allegory of the Cave

Both Marking Lines and Amorphous use demarcation to create boundaries by limiting the seen and gestured toward space. Emerging as an oblong, vertical, and oval, blackish and grayish shape is an amorphous figure. Questioning what it is—female figure or creature that is a part of an avoidable unknown—creates this tension where the eye wanders up and down while trying to make sense of this form. The ceramic pieces placed at the bottom of the work also help to define the form. The dimensionality of the sculpture on canvas creates a boundary and demarcates space within the painting. The vertical drip marks in varied tones and colors centralizes the viewer but also derails the eye in seeing many different detailed sections. The black vertical drip marks specifically form a frame at the center of the canvas. The vertical stacked ceramics allow for the tones and shades to emphasize a fixed boundary or limits. Demarcating space creates anxiety. The painting reverses the normality of how we ‘read’ written text on a page or, in this case, view a piece of sculpture. The amorphous forms and the neutral color palette also contribute to producing spaces marked by demarcation and anxiety within the piece.  In Marking Lines, the two strips and the cut-outs also create this unavoidable unknown that is at the center of the canvas. The viewer becomes confused by the space. The perforation of patterns and the unaligned canvas revises what the frame can be because it’s not a perfectly formed rectangular.

The world has been offered to me as a kindness and it is my duty to share with others.

—David C. Pollock and Ruth E Van Reken, Third Culture Kids: Growing Up     Among Worlds

(De)construction in both Marking Lines and Amorphous becomes an effect of  breaking sections and materials into smaller pieces. In Amorphous, a 45-degree angle veers off from the centered figure. Quick and steady brushstrokes, brown, peach, pinks and grays all echo off the center shape, which is covered by stacked, broken ceramic pieces and torn brown paper bags painted in concise, wide and vertical brush strokes. The white and black marks that create the circles in Marking Lines deconstruct while also creating demarcated spaces. The hatch marks are precise and the cut-outs are clean in order to create a specific punctuation within the canvas. Leaving the hatch marks visible creates a sense of the possibility of more cutouts. Even with the hurried and rough gradient, it is clear that I am trying to get the viewer’s eye to move linearly as if the canvas is a line within a book.  By using a mix of materials, I am ‘refusing the binary’ of traditional painting by deconstructing the frame and taking away and adding material that usually is not used within the medium.

We experience illegibility when a text becomes hard to read. Both Amorphous and Marking Lines leave viewers going back and forth between legibility and illegibility within the materiality of each of the pieces. In Amorphous, the various materials from different mediums that I chose to use make it hard to identify each aspect of the materiality of the work. Smashed ceramics, a recycled paper bag, inked and various acrylic paint become muddy as viewers continue to figure out what exactly they are seeing. In Marking Lines, the hatch marks and the split the canvas create a sense of (il)legibility. The cut-outs create spaces that lead the viewer’s eye to look at other spaces on the wall then move on to where the canvas pauses and demands that we look left and then right.

This is at the heart of the issues of rootlessness and restlessness[...] This lack of ownership what gives that sense simultaneously belonging everywhere and nowhere

—David C. Pollock and Ruth E Van Reken, Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds

Each of the pieces becomes its own poetry through pauses and punctuation that create tension. As the artist I am trying to run towards the illegibility of medium but also reference how the notion of reformatting the frame is another way of experiencing self-awareness. By being a mixed media artist, I experience the impression of restlessness and the unknown of what piece is going to be and, this is what creates the tension within illegibility. 

  The vertical lines in Marking Lines create mobility within the piece, specifically because the painted lines and the built lines lead the viewers up and down from one edge to the other side of the canvas. The linearity of the cutouts uses the line of sight, and the eye is made to follow in a straight line that then moves down to the next merged canvas.

   In Marking Lines, there is a restlessness that creates movement, a constant need for our eyes to wander, to be mobile and not fixed, because of the tension from parallel lines that ‘move’ in opposite directions, pushing viewers past immobility into mobility and then back to immobility, leaving them in their own present.

I believe that in order to make something that’s meaningful you have to start by figuring yourself out psychologically. 

—Carol Boven, The Intimacy Gradient

Writing and reading theoretical/philosophical works by Paul Gilroy, Eve Sedgwick and Viktor Klemperer and looking at other contemporary artists including sculptor Angela Glajcar, photographer Chris McCaw, and sculptor Richard Long have helped me to put a voice to the anxiety and the tension of my mark-making. Creating and experiencing the vertical lines and hash marks in Amorphous and Marking Lines have made me aware of how I unintentionally incorporate my everyday life, my stream of consciousness and also my constant need to know why into my art-making process. Locating my work and discovering how it continues to be influenced by my thought process and lived experiences have been eye-opening experiences because both have allowed me to come to much understanding about myself. It also has allowed my work to become more intentional and driven in its chaos. Discovering these threads of connection has made me realize that all of my work is becoming more cohesive in my descriptive language and in the works’ themes of tension, texture and color.

My work also gives me a discourse to discuss my own life story that has been complicated with an excess of worldliness that not many people have had or will have. I’ve come to an awareness and acceptance that the puzzle pieces will never fit together exactly right and that there will always be spaces where I feel like both an outsider and an insider. Acknowledging these differences has helped me to accept and incorporate them into my visual work. I realize that because of my hyper-awareness of my surroundings and my way of reading other’s body language, I have consciously and unconsciously been living as the one in Plato’s Allegory who breaks free into the light and returns and shares his discovery with those who are still chained to an un-reality. All of these moments have shaped me and allow me to go back and forth between Plato’s sun and the shadowy cave.

Bibliography 

Carlock, Marty. "Sarah Sze’s Organized Chaos." Sculpture. Accessed December 2016. 

     http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag03/nov03/sze/sze.shtml.