monument #10, egg tempera, oil, and collage on wood with acrylic

I have a lot of things to remember.  That is why I started making these monuments.

I didn’t know that they were monuments when I was started, but, like most artists, I don’t immediately know what the subject of the work is when I am making it.  As I continued to make them, it was clear that they are markers, like a sign on the road.  They are indicators, placeholders, something that I recalled and needed to make manifest in a form that would serve as a container for that recollection.

Spaces have a residue.  I work to give that residue a form.  And an expression.

This rendering of form is not the same as recreating a room or building an environment.  It is more about sensation than anything else.  Sensation is a something that painting is dynamically suited to convey.  (Bridget Riley talks about this here.)  I am using touch, timing, color interval, placement and composition to create the sensation of the place, but not the place itself.  I am creating an interior sense of a body in a space without a theatrical recreation of an environment.  In this way, the work contests the sense of spectacle in art and instead posits recollection as the portal into the work.

My work has a direct relationship to lost spaces and lost people.  Rooms are filled with images of people who used to inhabit them. They are sites of memory. My impulse is to make an image for a specific space I wanted to remember, or a place that reoccured to me visually as well as emotionally.  These spaces need a memorial.

I don’t mean solely domestic space and I don’t mean the interior as in psychological, although I think both of those spaces figure into the work. (I came of age as a painter when Gaston Bachelard‘s ideas where going though school like a virus.)

I cut a section of a memory into a shape and mark it with an avatar, a witness.  I want to bring that space into your space, and mark it with light, because it is NOT your space.  I paint them on the back because I want to frame it in the light of memory, the halo of experience, the way you recall something while you are looking at something else.  It glows with recollection.  The corner, the edge, the meeting point, these can be the indicator of an entire environment.  The shift of surface is sometimes a subtle transition and sometimes blunt flex of thought.  It can be a marker of how a room changes, or how the body moves from one space to another.

To work in egg tempera is to embrace a different idea of time.  In a fundamental way, painting contains time.  The surface of a painting records everything.  And for the painter, you know what was there and you know what had to be destroyed in order to make the painting look the way it does.  For the painter, all of those paintings inform the last painting.

Sassetta,
Virgin of Humility
1440s
Panel, 79 x 46 cm
Collezione Vittorio Cini, Venice

The material also contains a sense of devotion.  Applied in strokes, each one drying immediately, and layering color in the most direct way, egg tempera allows me to caress the faces of the witnesses in the paintings over and over again. As Sassetta painted the Virgin, he touched her face over and over again. The act of rendering is an act of devotion.

A terrified Steve Locke chats with the amazing and patient Evan Garza

For those of you who missed the conversation that I had with the divine Evan Garza of FIAR at ICA/Boston about my work, the museum has created a new web cast of the lecture.  The Artist’s Voice will be a regular feature of the ICA.  See below:

THE ARTIST’S VOICE: STEVE LOCKE WITH EVAN GARZA
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Launched in September 2013, The Artist’s Voice is a free lecture series featuring some of the most important contemporary artists working today, including Amy Sillman, William Kentridge, Jim Hodges, Steve Locke and Mary Reid Kelley. This lecture series, which aligns with the ICA’s exhibition program, gives visitors direct access to these visionary artists as they discuss their work, influences and inspirations, offering a deeply meaningful engagement with the art of our time.
On September 19, 2013, artist Steve Locke sat down with Evan Garza—curator, writer, and co-founder of Fire Island Artist Residency (FIAR)—for an engaging conversation about objects, paintings, and the male figure in art.

Click here to go to the ICA’s site and view the full artist talk. 

http://artcorejournal.net/2013/05/06/truth-or-dare-with-steve-locke/

This is a picture of Greg at the Rox Diner in West Roxbury. He’s a badass. And he makes some terrific paintings, too.

Enjoy!

S

In addition to the treat of having the show, I’m so fortunate that the gallery is having an exhibition of photographs by Francesca Woodman. This is the first time the work has been seen in South America. It is a major event and the number of people, collectors, and artists who have come in just for a look has been electric.

Francesca Woodman, Polka Dots, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silverprint, 13.3 x 13.3 cm. © George and Betty Woodman, courtesy George and Betty Woodman

(I’ve provided a link to the SFMOMA Woodman retrospective. Reproductions, online and printed, almost always misrepresent the size of the prints and their relationship to frames and matting. I’ve included an installation picture for a better idea of the scale.)

The show officially opens tomorrow but there has been a steady stream of people anxious for a look at the photos. Their excitement has rekindled mine. I’ve seen this work for a long time, but the installation here is quite compelling. Mendes Wood’s gallery is a white cube but the ceiling has pointed rafters that that add a sense of place to the studied “neutrality” of the white box, as if an attic loft was exposed. It looks a bit like a reclaimed chapel. They gallerists have also chosen frames that have a hint of red wood coloring for the 20+ prints in the show. This tiny pulse of color animates the pictures, which is good. There have been too many sepulchral presentations of Woodman and in my opinion. This exhibition shows a young woman changing before our eyes, in the act of finding and becoming herself.

The show is pretty chronological. There are representative images from most of the bodies of work (unfortunately, none of Woodman’s exquisite cyanotypes are here) and there are some of the canonical images. Far and away my favorites are the photos where the body of the artist is used to expose and explain space and spaces. These pictures to me have always seemed like a fever dream, palpable and hallucinogenic. And like those dreams one tries to make sense of them to no avail. I’m less interested in why Woodman does what she does and more interested in the fact that she does it. When she crawls or floats or blends or reshapes her body she posits a world without boundaries of materiality. Is she crawling into that cabinet or turning into it? Is she kneeling on the mirror of floating out of it? In a pre-Photoshop world, she makes us ask “How did she do that?” I am sure that there are sophisticated technical reasons for the way the photos look (and Woodman is a master of them), but that isn’t the real “how” of my question. And figuring out techniques is not what keeps me staring at the photos. What I am asking is, in truth, how did she become lighter than air? How did she become a shadow?

Her craft is in service to a vision that feels very contemporary. In a world where gender is fluid, boundaries are permeable, and borders are contested, it’s exciting to see a young artist exploring and exposing those limits with her own body.

FRANCESCA WOODMAN
Mendes Wood
Rua da Consolação, 3358, Jardins, Sao Paulo, Brazil
June 23 – July 21, 2012