"Splash Series" 11/23/07

A toy watering can in my studio became an object of particular interest for me with its mimetic design as a tool- a vessel with the specific purpose to collect and in turn disperse a resource. This idea/image resonated for me with my experience of being 'student'- gaining (filling up) ideas/knowledge in order to hypothetically be of use in some tangible way. My acknowledgement that obtaining a resource can become the end game in a kind of circular activity is reflected in drawings of "self-watering" cans in Happy Hour: Academically Speaking, and Colorfast.

In the second iteration, the Splash series, I focus on form and color in beach toys abandoned like plastic relics of summer's interest. I redeploy them as metaphors for the phenomenon of becoming celebrity. Here color 'works' as the labor done to gain entry for media notice. The essential form/self is obfuscated or complicated in the venture of becoming 'colorful'. What we see in the production of these 'playthings'-the cost of transformation as tools for our distraction.

How our contemporary social landscape is shaped is the subject of several series of paintings and drawings that I group under the title Social Fabrics. Our shared use of prevalent systems of representation, an important and always evolving part of the social dynamic, works as well to fix and limit our perceptions of one another. My re-arrangements of these forms of representation question their function and authority as a means to elicit or suggest their inherent agency.

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I perceive that productions as seemingly unrelated as entertainment (here professional sports) or graphic illustrations (maps and other schematics) are experienced with such familiarity that their determinative nature is masked just below their finished surfaces. The complexity of these enterprises is, so to speak, hidden in plain sight. It is the intersections of the histories, practices, and authority of these productions as well as our relationship to them that constitute the conceptual and formal aspects of my query, which takes the form of pattern paintings, schematic abstractions, and maps.

In the series Ballpark Figures the daily barrage of newspaper sports coverage is the source for compositions based on contours of athletes "in play." Translating their forms into lush paisley abstractions resonates with the peculiar reality of players who are reduced to a number yet simultaneously elevated by the fetishism of their fans. Additionally, paisley, a common fabric pattern with a deep and complex history, serves as a metaphor for erased history and the emptying out of significance when a figure or form is commodified through being manufactured. Problematic aspects of the commercialization of sports slip away in its overwhelming spectacle. The decorative camouflage in these paintings implies underlying nuance.

In the series Domestic Balance decorative narrative images of pastoral bliss and social stratification - characteristic of toile - are tweaked and re-presented as pedestrian signs to suggest reconsideration of our relationship to the status quo in what often in reality is a contested social landscape. The straightforward formal simplicity of the series is complicated by the way each work acts as a map in its locating function, as a text in its left-to-right reading, and in a nod to time-based work, as a 'camera' in its shifting of views from image to image.

The Schematic abstractions puzzle the relationship between the business of sports and the locales from which players are drawn.

The Re:Mix map series probes mapping's authority to order as much as to describe and acts symbolically to redress - in space - the images of social engineering that maps can represent over time.

-Paula Henderson, 2007