A Long Road

Tryptich, each panel 12 x 12 inches. Rusted steel panels, granite, marble, smalti, lead type slugs, coated wire, tinted thinset.

artist's statement: I have long been a typography geek. Ever since I began to work in the mosaic medium, I’ve wanted to incorporate typography into my work.  Toward this end, I began collecting 1950s era lead type, including forty Chinese type slugs, twenty of which I used in this artwork. However, since misappropriated “foreign” languages on t-shirts, hats, and tattoos has become a global phenomenon, I didn’t want to incorporate logograms with meanings unknown to me. So I stamped each type slug onto paper (see below), and obtained a translation from a friend. The process revealed characters with meanings that could be considered evil, unpleasant, or criminal, so I eliminated them from inclusion in the artwork. This first stage of selection did not sufficiently reduce my pool of candidates, so for the second round of selection, I chose characters whose shape and form were pleasing to me. I realized in hindsight that my background check and selection criteria were discriminatory and subjective.  Nevertheless, I couldn’t incorporate all the type slugs, so I put the twenty rejects back into the box. Their fate is uncertain.

Exhibition in Seattle

Trans-Position:An Ancient Medium in a Contemporary World

I will be participating in this show with my site-responsive work titled A Long Road.

Curated by Seattle artists Jo Braun, Kate Jessup and Kelley Knickerbocker.

A little background for this exhibition: Trans-Position: An Ancient Medium in a Contemporary World is a site-responsive exhibition showcasing the work of fifteen to twenty invited artists from the Americas working in the mosaic medium.  The site is Inscape Arts, an arts and culture enclave occupying Seattle’s former Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) building, a 77,000 square foot neoclassical structure built in 1932.  Renovations have preserved the building’s original character and role as “the Ellis Island of the Pacific Northwest”; and the artists and organizations housed within both preserve and evolve the building’s role as a nexus of cultural vibrancy in the greater community.

The three curators invited the exhibiting artists to create works with these objectives in mind:

• Create an exhibition that emphasizes content in addition to medium
• Engage the surrounding community—geographic, virtual, and metaphorical—in a fun, thought-provoking visual and cultural experience
• Showcase American (Western Hemisphere, by birth or immigration) artists whose work is critical and experimental
• Provide visitors with an exhibition that bridges ancient and contemporary, past and present
• Provide visitors with an exhibition that expands their understanding of mosaic as a form of contemporary artistic expression
• Challenge traditional art world institutions to consider the mosaic medium in its contemporary incarnation(s)
• Inspire viewers to rethink borders, boundaries, categories, institutions, and other socio-structural forces in a critical, liberating way

For more information on the building, go to http://www.inscapearts.org/

For more on my work in this show, see the next post.