Posit

A journal of literature and art

David Storey

Posted on May 25, 2023 by Posit Editor

—click on any image to enlarge—

Artist’s Statement

I make paintings that engage the fluidly permeable boundaries between image and abstraction. Invention, configuration, clarity and the potential energy of color are essential elements to shape a painting that is being made to be uniquely about itself.

Painting is the proper forum for the description of an entire world. It can be an endless, timeless vista that seems to have boundaries yet presents no limits to the possibilities of ever renewing transformation.

Viewing and engaging with a painting is a contract. Once the terms are agreed upon all separations dissolve. The physical laws of here and now are void. Opposites merge. Painting brings us to another mysterious world within our own, collapsing sameness and difference into a universal visual moment.

David Storey is an artist who lives and works in New York. He makes paintings, drawings and prints that compound and condense the interaction between image and abstraction. Collections include the Museum of Modern Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Fellowships include the Guggenheim Foundation and an NEA individual artist’s fellowship in addition to residencies at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. Public art projects include for the MTA, fourteen mosaic murals installed in the 20th Ave. of the N line subway in Brooklyn (2019).

Jeanne Silverthorne

Posted on May 25, 2023 by Posit Editor

alt= — And the Unfathomable Night of Dreams Began (2022)

alt= — And the Unfathomable Night of Dreams Began (2022)

—click on any image to enlarge—

Artist’s Statement

These recent works continue a 30-year dissection of the studio, which has been variously the mythic residence of the genius and the failure, the haunted house of a former sweatshop, the inside of my head, the enclosing globe of the world, my father’s workshop and now in these new pieces “my mother’s house” (title of a Collette autobiography).

The focus here is on the construction of the uncertain self that operates both in the studio and in the world, with figures that range from infancy to the edge of old age, wherein hints of the monstrous or “unnatural” contrast with the blamelessness of a baby. The perceived duality of a constructed self and a rapturous, dreaming self, of seeming innocence and born knowingness, can be summed up in two quotations: from D.W. Winnicott, famed child psychoanalyst, “There is no such thing as a baby;” and from novelist Clarice Lispector, “And the unfathomable night of dreams began, vast, levitating.”

While there are nods to my own family history, these sculptures remain allusive to specific studio tropes: storage in the form of bubble wrap, packing tape, two-by-four’s, crates, hammers, a dolly, a lamp modeled on an enlargement of a scrap of casting debris, images of exhausted and frustrated labor—all cast in rubber, my chosen material for many decades.

Jeanne Silverthorne is a New York sculptor. Solo exhibitions include the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., Whitney Museum of Art, Rocca Paolinea, Perugia, P.S.1, New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the University of Kentucky Museum, career surveys at the Wright Museum, Beloit and Rowan University, a collaboration with Elaine Reichek at the Addison Museum, as well as one-person shows at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Verona, Seoul, and Ireland.

Her work is in the collections of the following institutions: Museum of Modern Art, New York, Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., FNAC (Fondation Nationale d’Art Contemporaine),Denver Museum, Albright KnoxMuseum, Weatherspoon Museum San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts,RISDI Museum, Boca Raton Museum, Leeum.Samsung Museum, Korea, Sheldon Museum, the Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii, Addison Museum of American Art, Whitney Museum of Art.

Articles and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art News, Sculpture Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Brooklyn Rail, among other publications.

Silverthorne has been the recipient of various awards and grants: a Guggenheim Foundations grant, a Joan Mitchell foundation award, Penny McCall award, Anonymous was a Woman, Civitelli Ranieri Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts.

Jane Kent

Posted on May 25, 2023 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement

Printed images, to me, are built from the ground plane forward. Layer over layer. I begin with an object using drawing to uncover the oddness of everyday things. For this new work, I am using mirrors. Loosely drawn ovals and rectangles are placed over a backdrop of wallpaper; graphic shorthand of diagonal stripes represents reflective surfaces which become fields of color.

Previously, I have worked with unfolded cardboard boxes, shower heads, clock faces and
drafting lights. Now, I am looking at the distinct configurations of reflection — looking at subject as an invitation to look at looking itself.

Jane Kent makes drawings, prints and artists’ books. She has been working on an artists’ book project since 1999 and has just completed her 6th collaborative project in this series, Little Albert. Working with a previously unpublished prose poem by Joyce Carol Oates, Little Albert, published by Grenfell Press, will be released in May 2023. Kent’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of Art, Library of Congress, Print and Rare Book Division, Beinecke Library, among others. She has previously shown at the Brooklyn Museum, Mississippi Museum of Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, International Print Center of New York, among others. She has been awarded grants from the Lower Eastside Printshop, NY (publishing residency), 2022; Barbara and Thomas Putnam Fellowship, MacDowell Colony, Artist Residency Fellowship, 2012; The Corporation of Yaddo (artists’ fellowship), 2017, 2004, 1995; National Endowment for the Arts (individual artists’ grant), 1990; among others. She lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Vermont.

Jill Moser

Posted on January 24, 2023 by Posit Editor

Laura Moriarty

Posted on January 24, 2023 by Posit Editor

from rapt glass (detail)

Which Walk 0

re:assemblance

“Take a walk”
—Yoko Ono, WALK PIECE

and look out
as the broken world

breaks again
drawn to bits (I am)

deranged iota jot

flakes of fixed

whatnot

mechanisms meant
to broach when and where

to find or feel
a finite set with infinite

limitations as when
feast, fetish, or metonymic

gesture connects a personal
system with reference

to civic locality as
streets’ vocal

versions of themselves,
when what is heard

is seen, gleaned,
recollected, and erected,

luck, self-
defined, becomes us,

bent into position feeling to find

beads balls brass steel

nailed screwed

scaled up run out

resurrected, inwardly

directed to
arrange and play
as we (rapt)
are carried off,

untroubled by resemblance,
guiding principle, or epistemic

framework, though having those,
while making these directed

acts of storage strutted,
glutted, taken up, as I/we

reaching back
to owned devices,

feel free, imaginary,
and tactile as the shudder

of daily acquisition,
domestic, timebound,

vexed by practitioners,
whose practice

like ours,
a consummation,

is thrown up and out
as the poison

presence of each entrance
of nonlife into life

twists loops moves

circles spits and splits

giving into

walking while

compromised by things
aging in place

as matter hardened to its
constituents is what

we find when we amass and
detach the past of an object
from its fate creating
an elegy for each fact,

used or not, whose provenance,
always one of loss,

rejection, and subsequent
stooping to find (oneself) with

items grounded by chance, labor
or the erasure of same

becomes stuff subject
to words like reality

adding up
to what we want:

an engine of past time,
creation, and abstraction

whose apparatus
reflects the precision of

wrapped glass

collapsed threading through

the fastness

of everything as everything
found or findable

resolves into action

from rapt glass

Which Walk 5

the maid real

“Old Woman, your eye searches the field like a scythe!”
—Robert Duncan, “The Structure of Rime VI”

like a sigh, permitted or not,
these visits to Mira Vista

Field fair farm (or look see

place) which with

walking later

renounces renunciation

the better to incantate as
phrase after praise betrays
the visible day to the visible

night today singing what can you say,
moment by movement, or see

worried, wise, amazed—
heard, herded, heralded, crazed

by this old epithet, rule, and designation

of hags for which read old
women whose presence
absent to some,

purely physical to others, despite being where
and what they/I, are required to be, go, say,

and know noting how

dreamed of mental meeting

protocols in the form of songs and knowledge
combine the known with the read, said,
intoned, and suggested,

along with the berries there, also
red, thorns with which to be bled,
leave one stepping out attired

with gown, crown, and scythe
clearing what has died into

what is born by the poem of the mind
including words not me but mine

while I, menaced by remembered threats,
summon my ways and those of my actual

mother, Mae Belle Reynolds,
to push in and back out while
hatted, masked, cloaked, fraught

being with her (withered) wrought

where belief relief

knowing & going are brought

along with these steps at the feet of which lay

we, reconfigured into us, who
write what is read, said, and

displayed, resolving the “made place”
into the made real day

from rapt glass (sketch)

Which Walk 6

problem of reversible time

“. . . which am I?”
—Rumi, The Essential Rumi

who (exigene)
portends to redeem

exigencies of a woman
and man in a van when

our names meant light, knight, air, and ones who fly (are flown) when you,
Sufi, carpenter, botanist, and me, writer, waitress, artist of cards and
fortunes, later lose our clothes on the way to losing our minds and hearts
(mine) in a known place where written as played

a woman much withered, a maid
a maiden with a wand a handsome
maid, a white wand with a peacock of
solid gold on its tip

(we) submit
to the reversible fortunes

of muscle memory and the
illusive person in the poem

including types of knowing as when

The Land That Time Forgot
or trip into symbolic space

whose trace discloses

beauty at intervals as (not)

lucid eyes

of mind remain blind to the
inevitable arrangement’s

transformation of attitude,
and altitude calculable only from

the surface or search image
of a specific person

whose comparative anatomy
comes into play when the algorithm

leads us farther into the past—
but if this is the solution

please explain the bones
in the ghost story of the other
lover or the card games there.

Bring in Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale

and other extinction events.
It was crazy for anyone to try

to cross the Sierras in October.
What happens next as we

decohere among the hominins (despite
the abstraction, attraction, and object lessons)

is anybody’s guess.

untitled

Which Walk 7

what and who

A dark day finds
heart’s head hatted

and masked with crime
being read into its head

as descent into the local hell

means taking in the ashy
remains of everything with

each breath a reckoning, each step
the mistake of not sheltering in place

while elsewhere breath

taken fills

the same head with fresh despair
of the deadly situation where seconds

become minutes then
centuries where the dead lay
with vast fires closing in

but not here or not yet as
trying for a semblance

of thought as active leveraged

expression of fair

weather’s familiar

talk while reassembling the same
everything in head’s heart

of later air clear for now

though nothing is better
except if it is when

kinds of crime rhyme
what is wrong (but present)

with what (and who) are gone

untitled

symmetry

Are there two lines because there are two feet, hands, eyes? Maybe. This walking and making is a process, a procession. When she called an earlier book Symmetry she meant to dismantle this concept with each gesture. Is this that? she wonders, but suspects it is not—as, falling endlessly forward, she moves through space like a sound or a bird. A need for trust occurs. Balance. Emptiness. You can’t think about every step, but you should, she worries. Situational awareness. A military term. A thing is exact. Or exactly not. Intentional. Intended. Once her project was something like courtly love but now she feels betrothed to her work.

The woman stares at herself in the mirror. She makes self-portraits less because of an interest in self than because she is her only model. She enjoys drawing her wrinkles because they add texture. Me and not me, she is simply a thoughtful arrangement of phrases, lines, and planes—scribbled hair.

—from Which Walks

Laura Moriarty was born in St. Paul, MN, and grew up in Cape Cod and Northern California. She attended the University of California at Berkeley. She was the Director of the American Poetry Archives at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University for many years. She has taught at Naropa University and Mills College. She was Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution for two decades. She won the Poetry Center Book Award in 1983, a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry in 1992, a New Langton Arts Award in Literature in 1998, and a Fund for Poetry grant in 2007. Her most recent book is Personal Volcano from Nightboat. Which Walks is forthcoming from Nightboat. She lives in Richmond, CA.

Ron Baron

Posted on January 24, 2023 by Posit Editor

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Artist’s Statement: Shattered Vase Theory

Each of my sculptures is composed of a stack of found, commonplace ceramic objects that have been assembled into a vase-like form. These layers of castoff objects form a stratigraphy analogous to that of rock, soil and earth. But, unlike geological materials, these household objects once had a human function: family meals were served on them; they were collected as mementos; or perhaps they served as reminders of important events. Eventually, for whatever reason, the objects lost their value, and what was once cherished became obsolete and insignificant. It is the very forlornness of these abandoned objects that I’m attracted to—even as castoffs they reflect a life, a culture, a moment.

The same kind of artifact provides the raw material for the mosaic of shards that covers the exterior of my vessels. In a sort of reverse archaeology, I smash the whole object and use its fragments to create a Cubist-like skin for the vessel, thereby creating a new form that amalgamates the shattered traces of individuals and families who once possessed these objects. Collaged onto the fragmented surfaces are autobiographical images such as maps from my family travels and experiences. The result is a composite of culture, artifact, and personal history.

I began making these shattered vase forms at home during the COVID quarantine as two-dimensional collages on wood panels. When I was finally able to return to the studio I began to transpose them into three-dimensional bricolage sculptures. During this process I encountered the “Shattered Vase Theory,” a psychological concept introduced by Stephen Joseph in his book, What Doesn’t Kill Us – The New Psychology of Post-traumatic Growth. The theory grew out of a 1990s psychological study of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In Joseph’s concept, the shattered vase is a metaphor for someone who has experienced severe loss, trauma and PTSD. The essence of the analogy is that we begin as a beautiful vase, intact and lovely. Then tragedy strikes and the once perfect vase is shattered. There is a yearning to pick up the pieces, to glue and reassemble the vase as it once was, but this isn’t achievable. Instead, with some time and reevaluation one can begin to imagine that these shards could be transformed and reassembled into something entirely new and perhaps also wonderful.

This fresh perspective is what psychologists refer to as Post-Stress Growth (PSG), that is, the ability to transform a traumatic experience into a renewed possibility through an acceptance of change. Surprisingly, PSG happens to a fairly large percentage of people who have encountered severe trauma. Evidently, I belong to this group, in that my shattered vase sculptures bloomed from my family’s trauma.

Ron Baron has shown his work nationally and internationally since 1989 and completed over 25 public art projects throughout the United States. Some of his most prominent commissions are with the Metropolitan Transit Association NYC, Indianapolis International Airport, Board of Education NYC, Depart of Cultural Affairs NYC, Alaska International Airport, Chicago Transit Authority, Cleveland Transit Authority, University of Oregon, Portland Regional Arts Council and the Department of Cultural Affairs San Jose, CA. Baron has won numerous awards including New York Foundation for the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Pollock-Krasner, Yaddo Endowed Residency and a Lila Wallace Endowed Residency at the Monet Museum in Giverny, France.

Soledad Salamé

Posted on September 30, 2022 by Posit Editor

Garden of the Sacred Light (1994) — Grotto (1994)

—click on any image to enlarge—

—images courtesy of Goya Contemporary and the artist—

Artist’s Statement

My art is a conceptual and visual exploration of the intersection of science, technology, and social justice issues defining the age in which we live. Engaged with the political implications of environmental issues, my recent work maps vulnerable marginalized communities suffering the greatest consequences of natural disasters.

Working in glass, silk, and paper effectively extended my visual vocabulary, incorporating textual relief elements to underscore collective negligence regarding climate change, including rapid melting of glaciers and polar ice caps. Climate change has triggered people’s migration from areas affected by rising water and unstable weather. In the USA, Border security policies intensify the social impact of migration, exacerbating unsustainable environmental practices.

Our world is in a constant flux and transformation. The way we communicate our actions’ consequences has been transformed. We once created a tactile object – a newspaper — providing a richly physical interaction made from plant-based paper; today, with the slow death of print media, we interact with world news through digital reporting, easily distorted or manipulated.

I wish to record this change as a call to action to protect both the earth’s precious natural resources and its people, while pointing to the fragile beauty surrounding us. By magnifying the pleasures inherent in natural materials — paper, textiles, and even sand-based glass – my work seeks to remind us of the magnificence and splendor that may be lost if we do not protect the environment.

Soledad Salamé, American, was born in Santiago, Chile in 1954. She currently lives and works
in Baltimore, Maryland, where she directs Sol Print Studio, an experimental space for artists to develop and refine their printmaking skills.

From 1973 to 1983 Salamé lived and studied in Venezuela. During this time she was exposed to the rainforest, a pivotal experience in her artistic development. As an interdisciplinary artist, Salamé creates work that originates from extensive research of specific environmental and human rights topics. In the pursuit of new ideas, she has conducted intensive field research in the Americas, and Antarctica.

Her work has been presented at multiple venues, Baltimore Museum of Art, Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, MD. Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Denver Museum of Art, CO; Miami Art Museum, FL; El Museo Del Barrio, NY; The Women Museum, Washington DC; and the Museo de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile.

Salamé’s work is represented in private and public collections internationally, including The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, The Baltimore Museum of Art. Her work is included in The Contemporary Museum, 20 Years, by Irene Hoffman, Latin American Women Artists of the United States, by Robert Henkes and Latin American Art in the Twentieth Century, by Edward J. Sullivan.

Donna McCullough

Posted on September 30, 2022 by Posit Editor

—click on any image to enlarge—

Artist’s Statement

Fashion is well known as a reliable reflection of cultural trends and historical events. On a personal level, it has become my creative vehicle for exploring and recording life events—my three dimensional diary.

My inspiration arose from contemplating the dichotomy between the perception of women as fragile, delicate creatures, and the reality that most women are defined by resiliency and steely resolve. My work is about women and culture – women throughout history and women in my life. I employ a juxtaposition of extremes such as lightness and gravity, suppleness and intransigence, to convey feminine sensibilities.

Crafted of steel and embellished with flourishes of wire mesh, screening, cut-outs and bits of found objects, the dresses are at once both elegant and imposing. I use steel and various found metals including tin cans and vintage oil cans. Nearly all of the materials I use are recycled. I like the duplicitous nature of steel which can be manipulated to appear feminine and soft while actually maintaining its strength and rigidity—an expression in contrasts and complements. Through the dresses, I am combining opposites to activate harmonious and ethereal beauty.

Donna M. McCullough was born and currently lives in Maryland. Beginning her career as a painter and print maker, McCullough switched to sculpture in 1996. Working mostly in steel and found objects, she has also ventured into other media including stone and wood. She has exhibited at the Corcoran Museum of Art, the Art Museum of the Americas, the Hickory Museum of Art, the International Museum of the Horse, the Grounds for Sculpture, and the United States Botanic Garden. Her work is in collections nationally and internationally.

Ana Rendich

Posted on May 17, 2022 by Posit Editor

—click on any image to enlarge—

Artist’s Statement

I have always been connected to the invisible and visible aspects of human drama, the particular and the universal. Although my paintings and sculptures are my own work, they are not intended to be about me. The subject matter is greater than me as an individual. My studio is like a lab, where space, form and meaning intertwine, shaping and filling my artworks.

I have been exploring the Japanese concept “Ma” (間), a concept embedded in our relationship with our space, internal and external, and how we relate one to another one; as well as the interpretation of time and space, pauses and silences, and the emptiness in a space, full of possibilities. This concept MA is the skeleton of my works, where my art starts. These sculptures, mixed media and paintings emerge from a thought, an infinite path with no endpoint, where resolution is impossible. Hope in the light of loss and displacement is my primary subject. The works are fragments of what has been lost, negated, and postponed. Their structures are a form of reparation, a healing tool, tying together absences and presences, sometimes in a meditative form.

In some of my sculptures, I incorporate resin, because of its reflective or opaque property, but I transform it, leaving my own fingerprints, and colors are mainly a tool that reveals presence. In certain works, the observer can see the ghostly effect generated by the reflection created by the mixed media illustrating the transient and mercurial nature of reality. Upon seeing my art, many find that the colors draw their attention before anything else. The story behind these colors is born in the interplay between these colors, but it is not color itself that matters most to me. Rather, the color is secondary, the whole composition makes the work… Colors and shapes are not separated elements, both are an essential symbiosis. When I make an artwork that contains individual pieces, it is always thinking that each piece must belong to the next artwork, creating a work, where all the pieces share the same space; the togetherness is what makes the work.

My work has been evolving and changing every year, incorporating new media and materials. Sculpture and mixed media has helped me to grow, and it gives me the chance to explore pieces rooted in the human condition, past and present social and historic events. In the WWII pieces, for example, the research in getting the letters from WWII has been a long road, it almost took me two years until I started to work.

The base of my art is bringing presence through absence. There are different types of absences: not only physical absence, but also the lack of the fabric that could make us better human beings. All these have created the need to incorporate other elements, according to the sensibility of each piece, like the use of wood, fabric, metal, yarn and paper, besides oil, silicone, etc. I enjoy immensely the closeness with my materials, that intimacy…the tactile and physical connection, too, aids to create a deep connection with space, form and meaning, leaving all decorative items aside, and helps me to concentrate more in exploration, questioning and contemplation. I see the reflections, materials and surfaces as healing presences, making the invisible visible.

Ana Rendich was born in Argentina and lives and works in Spotsylvania, Viriginia. She attended Instituto Superior de Arte del Teatro Colon, University del Salvador, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and the National Academy of Design, New York, New York.

Taraneh Mosadegh

Posted on May 17, 2022 by Posit Editor

Mount Damavand (2021) — The Wind Will Carry Us (2021)

—click on any image to enlarge—

Artist’s Statement

In my practice, by using Micro/Macro levels of observation and intuition, I intend to understand nature, humanity, science, and the threads and patterns that connect them. I mean to acknowledge the interconnectedness between humans and other forms of being without privileging humans. Repetitive mark-making, exploring the materiality of paint and the transparency of each pigment, layering one on top of the other, creates a spatiality that helps me pinpoint zones where the human and the non-human overlap, intertwine and resonate.

Since 2020, I have been experimenting with a 400-year-old formal technique, Reverse Glass Painting, which uses a transparent material to combine reflective light on glass with the subject’s emergence. The surface glass covering the painting is also refractive, absorbing select wavelengths of light but not others. Using multiple layers of glass makes a material conversation of vernacular form and biomorphic organic shapes. Color, Reflection, and Refraction provide the vocabulary.

The trajectories of the reverse glass painting have been part of Iranian history for a long time: This technique arrived in Iran via the Silk Road around the 17th century from Venice. Safavids embraced it, and the Zand dynasty sustained it, but the method prevailed during the Qajar era (1789-1925). During this period, not only did Iranian paintings change as a result of European influence, but also Iran encountered political upheavals: Constitutional revolution; Women criticizing the social and political state of the nation; Iran getting partitioned by foreign forces, etc. Before this era, reverse glass painting was primarily used in interior decorations, but after that, it evolved to be autonomous artwork by individual artists. It reflected the realities of its time.

Taraneh Mosadegh is an Iranian visual artist based in Vermont and New York. She earned her MFA from The Le Roy. E Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA in Baltimore and her BFA from Tehran Art University. She has been an artist-in-residence at Vermont Studio Center, The Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and The Windy Mowing Artist Retreat. She has shown her work in Tehran, Toronto, Baltimore, Johnson VT, and Woodstock, NY. Mosadegh is the recipient of the 2022 Vermont Arts Council Development Grant and the 2019 Alumnux juried exhibition prize of Vermont Studio Center, where she will have a solo exhibition at The Red Mill Gallery in October 2022.

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Which Walk 0

Which Walk 5

Which Walk 6

Which Walk 7

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