Borders, Boundaries and the Backstory
I’ve been pondering the idea of borders and boundaries for a while now. Mostly human-made; physical and geopolitical ones, like those between states and nations. In my life, of late and generally, With crossing all kinds of borders, some quite surprising, I’ve been traveling toward new horizons in a process of reinvention. Borders between people as opposed to geopolitical ones are usually referred to as boundaries. Personal boundaries are a good and necessary thing to set, yet the setting and maintaining of them can often be difficult. How these concepts relate to my life and the journey into myself is the backstory.
The backstory to this exhibit is about that personal journey. In other words, it’s all about me. Isn’t most art a self-indulgence? Yet how often have we been to an exhibition and felt inspired by someone else's self-indulgent obsessions to want more from ourselves and our own creativity. My hope is you will find some inspiration from the work and story of my backstory.
Since art school, my life has in fact been been one of reinvention. In my artistic life too, my creative expressions have taken various forms as well, and the the most constant representations of it have been in the medium of fabrics and garments. Lately however I have been exploring watercolors, charcoal and revisting photography, which has always been my first love.
When the Boxx Gallery offered me this residency, I really had to rethink how I would engage with the artwork that I make, and what happened is this exhibit became site specific. Over the first six weeks I was mostly in my head and thinking constantly about the space, concept and materials and how I would be able to present them in a way that would make sense.
Through photogography, clothing and painting I am illustrating how in each of these mediums the idea of translucence, opacity, borders and boundaries come into play. Juxtaposed against turbulence to calm, the photos are of wide open spaces with manmade elements in most of them and others of big bodies of water showing movement, distance, stillness. They are shot from the window of my car, boat, train or walking around. Using the grey scale as inspiration, the clothing is made of fabrics that move from translucence to opaque. To me this relates to black and white thinking and finding the shades between that represent a more open-minded approach to my life. The garments are constructed in the most rudimentary way, they are a concept, a prototype perhaps for future development. I did not use patterns, nor did I finish them in an expected way. The edges and seams are raw and fraying, like our borders and boundaries can be at times. The seams seem like they are about to fall apart, however they will hold together quite well. I compare that to how it feels when I fall apart, yet somehow I am held together by a few thin threads that keep me connected and allows me to find my way back to the middle ground and hopefully equanimity.
The suspension of the garments in groups represents how I understand the giant forests of the west coast. The Redwoods of Northern California propogate around the ‘Mother Tree’ and the Douglas fir, and Sitka Spruce from the ‘Nurse Tree’. Both of these are of the feminine. The colors of those forests range from the lightest to the blackened ‘skin’ of the burnt forests so ubiquitous now.
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