 |
| Mapping New Territory - writing (back) |
Letter from Candida to Sol LeWitt:
November 8, 2007 Dear Sol: It has been three years since we have been in touch and so much has happened since the last time you and Carol came to visit me in my studio in New Haven. I saved all the small postcard drawings you mailed us celebrating every New Year from 2000-2004. I am glad to hear you enjoyed the piece I sent you. What an honor to hear that you hung it up in your music room and library which you frequent every afternoon. Well, as it turns out I have been working towards a solo exhibit at the Tarble Arts Center. It is located in a very remote town named Charleston in Illinois. I was invited by the director to paint on the walls. I had only three previous opportunities to do that: in 1997 for my last semester at the Yale School of Art; in 1999 as an artist in residence at the International Artists Studio Program in Sweden and then most recently in 2006, at the Hyde Park Art Center for the Takeover exhibit. I admit I was in the dark about what to do here. The space was difficult: oak trim, a patterned rug and a video shelf. I walked through the glass doors, and my heart sank. Before I physically entered the space, I was envisioning elevating the oak trim upward towards the ceiling shelf, using shades of yellow. It would take in the depth of the trim as a beginning point and then it would get thinner and thinner until it disappeared. Almost like an Agnes Martin painting. That first weekend encounter was pivotal. My eyes kept moving towards the corners of the room. The oak baseboard had so many outlets that I considered color taping them and stretching the pattern upwards towards the ceilings. I also even considered designing a fabric skirt to hide the trim. At one point a secondary floor was going to be laid down, and painted glossy black. So the trim was a huge creative puzzle that would not go away. So in the end, we covered the entire trim with paper so that it would just blend as much as possible into the wall and all the work would be placed high up into the corners. I decided to bring those four small postcard drawings with me. I copied them onto transparent film and used overhead projectors to “draw” in space. So many ideas crossed my mind and over time, I was able to strip them away until what was left was what I felt was essential. I knew that my relationship to making and exhibitions was changing. I wanted to take on this opportunity to witness myself, my thinking, my process of arriving at and dismantling ideas. I wanted transparency. I wrote the four lines that became the title of the show in my studio in Chicago. It was my focus throughout. Tossing Pennies The title came about like a poem. I thought about the two years I spent in graduate school at the Yale School of Art from 95-97. I was studying with your good friend Mel Bochner who had just opened his exhibit entitled Thought Made Visible 1966-1973. I was trying to understand what conceptual artists did, and I found his exhibit quite startling. For one, there was not much there. I was most intrigued by his penny piece with masking tape that occupied a small rectangle on two sides of a huge wall. There were flashe drawings on the wall as well. That is when I first heard about flashe paint and started using it. My first turning point piece was called Intention, 1995. It used nails to represent the number of the letter in the alphabet in order to spell out the word intention. I then added white cooking string as a secondary field over the nails. Of the four drawings I brought with me, I decided to use the earliest one from the year 2000. It was the same one I used for the piece you have hanging up in your house! I specially like that one because it reminds me of the view inside your studio window that faces and frames the trees on your property in Chester. All the other ones are more geometric. So in many ways, what I started to do with it was to “sample” it. I used the overhead projectors to push the drawing through the lens of optics to see how it shifted and altered itself. I also used flashe paint to dismantle its linearity. Ultimately it reduced itself to just an armature from which my ideas could rest or shift against. I was happy to be working. I turned the gallery into a studio. At first, I thought I would just project one of the drawings I had made on site, and paint it on the wall. After a while, I realized that was a boring idea. I did not like the mural aspect of that. Instead I wanted the drawings to be like warm ups. I wanted to be on the wall, the way I am on the paper. There were a sense of familiarity and comfort. It took me a while to get there, but finally it the eve hours of the morning, I was ready. The big black almost rectangle in the upper left hand corner of the room is where I started. I wanted to activate the shelf and use a florescent yellow paint that reminded me of the fireflies. I wanted to create the feeling like the rectangle was erupting through the shelf. The second intervention was the pink shapes floating in almost a ring shape. I first painted one in the corner right hand side and it reminded me so much of Richard Tuttle, I had to get rid of it. So I decided to push the shape up higher and repeat it five times. The florescent pink has a way of creating a halo effect. Tossing pennies refers to the memory of my dad tossing pennies in the air for good luck and simultaneously the game of boxes he taught me to play. You know the game where you place dots on a sheet of paper in straight vertical rows and the object is to claim the most boxes with your initial by beating out the other players in drawing lines between the dots to form squares and capture wit. I projected your drawing onto the glass windows and then using pennies as the circular shapes, I zoomed into the drawing, tracing through the circles with markers, and then filling in with paint. I also found some charting tape, and used that to create the lines that connected the circles. The use of the tape brought me back to the late 80’s -90’s when I worked in the design department of Chase Manhattan Bank near the World Trade Center. There is a paintbrush coming out of the black circle in the ceiling. I liked the way it turned from a circle to an oval to a heart depending on where you stand in the gallery. Because I have been reading The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami I wanted to push one of the circles into a black hole/well metaphor. I did this by hanging a small brush which I used to paint the circle which also has the words “I love to paint” on it. It was a nod to my relationship to painting as well as to the children’s workshops that are conducted here by the Tarble Art Center. Finally there is the moving green light projection, which came last. I wanted to have an element that could move in the space and somehow flirt with the idea of a field. I wanted to capture the poetry of a firefly in motion. So, there it is in a nutshell. Let me know what you think. Candida |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
