MAY : word : MATTHEW HUGHES BOYKO : art : VANESSA MARSH

Vanessa Marsh: Model Sentimentality

an Interview by Matthew Hughes Boyko 

“Always Close But Never Touching”, that is the title of your exhibition. Why did you go with this specific phrase, I’m curious?

 

“Always Close but never touching” was the title of a series of photographs I was working on earlier. The two photographs in the show are from that series, the sculptures grew out of that work.

Vanessa didn’t really answer my question. I should have asked, “What do you mean by...?” I guess this is just one of those wonderfully abstracted intriguing themes that artists provide and you have to assume that it means something to the artist, to the work and hopefully the viewer...

You grew up in Seattle, a recurring theme in your work. Why are you in San Francisco?

I have a weird relationship with the place, specifically with Western Washington, West of the Cascades. These models are all from Western Washington. I decided to move away from Seattle because it couldn’t provide me with what I wanted from life... and as an artist, what I needed from art.

 

When I decided to apply for my Masters study none of the schools in Seattle really spoke to me. I knew I didn’t want to continue to live there, since that’s where I lived for my entire life and I knew there were certain things Seattle couldn’t provide. I picked San Francisco as an area I felt I could settle down in for a little while. Part of why you go to graduate school is to find out how to build a community and begin your network of people. The idea of doing that and leaving right afterwards (leaving Seattle) just didn’t make sense to me at that point. Now I’m part of a community, I know people and people know who I am.

 

I first met Vanessa when she was going to school at CCA, she was in her 2nd year of the MFA program. The community she talks about are some local favorites: Mitzi Pederson, Sean McFarland, James Chronister. Schools help to nurture the special community of art friends you develop while you are in the 2-3 year program. The relationships you initiate while in school tend to last and are integral in your professional development as an artist.

 

Can you give me a little history of your art making practice? How did you arrive at the model pieces that represent a majority of this exhibition?

 

I began making the models to create a certain type of photograph. I would create the model with a certain image in mind; both with the end result of the photo piece and the role the model would have in the photograph.

 

The “False Horizon” series that I was doing in graduate school (2003-04) and the work that I did during my time at the Headlands Center for the Arts were made by my buying model kits, putting them together, weathering (painting) the model and then photographing it. Sometimes I would only finish the model to the point it needed to be worked just for the photograph. I had always wanted to make models of specific places, but I didn’t have the skills at the time to build it from scratch.

 

In this last year I had a job at a place called Figureplant, a model making business. It was a fabrication plant and I was working on a project for the Conservatory of Flowers building models based on San Francisco landmarks. Detail and recognition were key points of the job and that experience helped to develop my model making skills. After that I got more comfortable with building things. I was excited because I recently went to Seattle, took some reference shots of my memories growing up there and started to develop the model work based on these new/old locations.

 

It was a combination of factors, like having that job, going to Seattle, taking those shots of specific places and wanting to create models that I felt a lot of sentimentality towards...a longing to be at this place had a fair amount to do with this work.

 

This term sentimentality comes up a lot during the interview. Vanessa’s use of this concept, how it is built into her practice and how she defines it has certainly made me reconsider how I see her work and the sentimental aspects inherent to the psychological places she creates.

 

That was certainly a clear explanation of your process in making the physical piece. What decisions have you made when considering the conceptual frame of the works?

How do you keep the composure of psychology in this method of art making? Of creating models instead of photographs, how are you using the mediums involved and dealing with the spatial requirements demanded of a three-dimensional work versus a photograph?

 

With the photographs the dreamy/surreal quality of that visual look is coming from putting the model in front of my camera and taking a picture of it outside in a real environment. Creating an image that looks real, but that also has a dream-like quality in the sense that there is something super realistic about them. It was about being able to enter into the photograph and go into a place, experience a place that I remember, or want to remember.

 

There’s something special about building the models, I really enjoyed the tactileness of them... I liked the perspective that I get when looking at it.  A photograph is a photograph, it’s a flat two-dimensional thing and the psychology involved comes from the picture plane. The models can be viewed in a different way, in that you can get close to it and have that psychological experience with this recreated physical place. You see them from different angles, different perspectives, literally and figuratively.

 

I am making a work of art, not a model. I want it to be presented almost like a painting or a sculpture, as opposed to it just being a model, not  “oh I’m a model-maker and I make these models...” I want it to be something that has more to it than just a model. These places are built from a time in my life when I knew that I wanted to be an artist. I started to feel a lot of creativity in high school, I got my first car, my first camera and I would go on these long drives to the places I am referencing in the models. I would trespass. I would take pictures and spend a lot of time by myself in these places.

 

Vanessa’s history is in direct correlation to the works she has made. This is always the case with artists and the art works they produce. Being able to see and understand that subtext may or may not offer additional insight into the work but it is always entertaining.  An artist that allows you to build a narrative from their artwork, to construct your own fantasies of what is happening or what has happened is a good thing. Vanessa has created pieces that do not force a prescriptive viewing; rather they softly open the window of interpretation for the viewer, granting them their own narrative and personal histories they associate with the sites she has created.

 

How does the element of your history get to the viewer without you being right next to them telling them why the places are important to you? Is this a concern you have with your work?

I guess one would hope that the work is good enough, that something just comes through...

The foundation I use when making these pieces is about me revisiting those places, revisiting a time when I started on the path that has led me here today, those starting points. I think it’s okay for people to come to them and bring their own stories, their own impressions of what it is they are looking at.

 

The titles and the artist statement are available and it describes what you are asking to some extent.

I first made the “Waterfront Building, Aberdeen WA”, then the “Georgia Pacific Storage Warehouse, Bellingham WA” then the “Incomplete Freeway On-Ramp, Seattle WA.” and then I made the “Cement Factory Seattle WA “ and the “Bridge House, Harbor Island WA” at the same time.

 

Out of the 5, the “Incomplete Freeway On-Ramp, Seattle WA.” is the closest to me, this is the most sentimental, this is actually a point that I’ve been to multiple times in my life, a place I have multiple memories from. It’s in the Arboretum, they were planning on building this whole crazy freeway network and they never finished it.

I want there to be immediacy between the works, I don’t want there to be a barrier for anyone.

Did you jump off there (referring to the end of the freeway)?

I did, I jumped off from it in High School a few times, into the lake, in the summer.

I ask this question because when I look at that On-Ramp... One part of me does react to the piece as a model, I think of an abandoned bridge/freeway thing going over water but... one part of me, just looking at the railing detail, reminds me of the Little Piney River Bridge, just on the outskirts of Newburg, Missouri and relentlessly recalls the fact that I never did jump off, not once.

The detail work in these pieces allows me to enter my own memory of a like place. How are you considering feeling in relation to the physical process of producing these sculptures?

 

A lot of the production quality and surface textures were made with aesthetic purpose. I wanted to take an approach with these sculptures that was really honest and not over thought. I didn’t want to sit around my studio wondering why I was doing what I was doing. I wanted it to be a more organic process. In that way, it’s been a very liberating experience to make this work. Just being in my studio and being like, “Oh I have a pile of old shelves, I’m going to cut them up and see how they look as a pedestal!” or “Hey, I have this piece of wood, I wonder...”

 

In a lot of ways I’m really nervous and scared about this show because it’s still really new to me and I just don’t feel super confident about it. They are all abandoned places, except “Bridge House Harbor, Island WA”. But even that one had an interesting vacancy about it because, even though there was someone living in it, it felt like the building and the people were abandoned somehow... that’s the type of mental response I am trying to evoke from these works.

 

That the viewer is able to find a “like place” in their own set of memories is a good response since I am attempting to instill a sentimental experience with the artwork. I mean, that’s the artist’s hope, right? Even in the most abstract painting there’s some sort of emotion that goes into it from the artist and if you were the artist creating that type of work you would hope that emotion would carry through to the viewer. This was another case of my letting myself go in terms of how I was working and letting myself create a literal level of abstraction with the painted sections in the model pieces.

 

Vanessa truly does take license with the soothing level of abstraction the watered areas of her sculptures. The painted abstractions add a feeling of unease and pollution to an already dilapidated building structure that feels deathly quiet and unwelcomingly serene as a real location.

 

Vanessa’s use of sentimentality to describe her work seems congruent to the finished pieces. She uses the concept to emotionally invite the viewer into these places. They are art works that requires you to minimum ally believe that these model sculptures mean something special to Vanessa and subsequently something to you, the viewer, which will eventually claim their own special memory and interpretation of the work.

 

I wanted to ask Vanessa why she had not included the same people models that were indicative of her earlier photo works into the model sculpture works. Her answer to the question satisfied my understanding of Vanessa Marsh, the artist and finished our interview with the sentimental thought that I would hope anyone seeing her art comes away with. The romantic intrigue of the artist, the exciting mystery surrounding the work and the patient wonder to see what this sentimental person will create in the future.

 

The work you are showing me, this model slide show of Vanessa’s life growing up, her memories of these spots and feelings accompanying them... why in these works are there no model people, no evidence of you being in them?

 

I think that’s one of the main reasons for having the ”The Girl Standing” photograph part of the show, that image is me. ”The Girl Standing” photograph, in a lot of ways... that’s me.

 

MAY : word : SARAH STONE : art : VANESSA MARSH

When rain fell,

 

were she foolish enough to ask herself ‘who am I’ she would fall flat on her face. That’s why thought, she says, means fear. Language goes with us into the house, the gap between mistake and morning sickness. First you break the windows, then you are the windows. The word ‘dream’ is not a word that closes.

 

 

**

 

 

Only in connection,

 

with a river do mists make sense. Days begin to orient themselves as I sleep without so much as a nightmare. Unable to find my own things in the darkness I pick up the objects ‘happiness,’ ‘unhappiness’ and ‘as much hot water as you wanted.’ I can see the tax collectors coming through the pines.

 

 

 

But this duration

 

wandering the open country, a rush of water. Where I feel most comfortable, simply to move twenty minutes to the west, so I can wander in your darkness. Crossing huge stretches of grass with a fat orange moon in the sky, I finally came to prefer memory. I find so much of you there I don’t think about arriving.

SARAH STONE 2009

MAY : word : RAY DAVIS : art : CHRISTINA LA SALA

Ray Davis, April 2009

In writing, it's called "a strong voice." Across materials, across moods, a sense of continuous engagement with another. Maybe not quite the human being you meet at the reception, the reading, or the party, but not a pose or a persona, no formula. Something wholer than that, someone you recognize when you enter the room.

In the voice of Christina La Sala, there's wit and "inwit" (as Middle English called "conscience"), with no hint of smirk. There's painstaking elegance, insisting on beauty even in shabbiness and loss. Art is what this voice does, and making art is necessarily making do.

There's a sort of dyslexic synesthesia, modal wires crossing at a dreamlike concept both reasonable and uncanny: Braille chewing gum, for example. ("'Well, I've tried to say How doth the little busy bee, but it all came different!' Alice replied in a very melancholy voice.")

There's a poised sense of confrontation: a dare to make the first move, to cross this line, tip this balance, pop the bubble, eat me, shatter me.... We're being asked, I think, to make a decision: to consume and have done, or to live with the experience. To live at all is to live with one's decisions and actions and circumstances.

Which is to live with one's art. The least escapist of artists, La Sala affirms without flurry or bluster, but hour by hour, week by week, over what Louis Zukofsky called "a poem of a life": the work of a life in work. Duration itself becomes preoccupation: the times that bind, as in the obsessive stitching of La Sala's "Stay Awake" bedsheet, with its dare to fall asleep.

When these characteristics coincide, there's nothing anecdotal about the result, but we're tempted to narrate, to put this perplexing artifact in its place in some known story. The voice resists us. The Rapunzel-length hair-and-steel-wool braid of La Sala's "Straw into Gold," for example, intertwines aging's fairy-tale transmutation of brown-to-gray with our age's science-fiction transmutation of organism-to-machine. Its weave is clean; the tangle is in the yarns we spin.

A return to glasswork after many years, "Petrified Forest" carries La Sala's voice at its strongest. In writing, it would be called a serial poem, a unified work made up of sets of paired individual works:

There's a row of large glass panels etched with various patterns -- floral garlands, diamonds diamonded, curved boxes, pinstripes -- made more elaborately decorative by shadow-play as each leans against the wall from a painted wooden platform -- which, in turn, has been marred by carved tally marks.

There's a column of squat glass strips, smeared by tally marks, as if by a fingertip dipped in acid. Each bar is held flush close against the wall; the shadows turn them into a trompe l'oeil of greasy icicles or streaked unguents.

Naturally, I'm tempted into narrative. I recognized one pattern from gift wrap or wallpaper of my childhood, and then I thought of cargo cults and Renaissance reliquaries: how the fragmented kitsch of one culture, after everything falls apart, inspires the high craft of another culture. And a prisoner in the ivory tower leaves marks which, preserved and honored after everything falls apart again, become reproduced in their turn. As Alan Squire said in The Petrified Forest, "I've formed a theory about that that would interest you. It's the graveyard of the civilization that's shot from under us."

But my ramshackle construction, full of plot-holes, hardly matches the piece's confident coherence. Perhaps I should be thinking instead of natural history and microbiological cultures: a science museum with brittle slabs impressed by ancient ferns, flowers, floods, and crystals, and with slide mounts demonstrating, oh, the effects of antibiotics?

But that hardly conveys the piece's aggression, humor, and endurance. I might as well take the etymological approach: Arizona's fossilized trees are extinct members of a botanical family that includes the Chilean monkey-puzzle tree, named Araucariaceae for the Arauco people who live in the region. "Contrary to popular belief, the Quechua word awqa 'rebel, enemy', is probably not the root of araucano: the latter is more likely derived from the placename rag ko 'clayey water'." Yes, that's clear as mud.

Or maybe it's best if I pass this to the strong voice of Alice Notley, a poet born in Bisbee, Arizona, about 300 miles south of Petrified Forest National Park:

  "This is distinction, says a voice,

   Your features are etched in

   ice so everyone can see them"

  "Poverty much maligned but beautiful

   has resulted in smaller houses replete with mysteries"

  "there's the desert beyond them that I try to keep housed from

   no thin flesh there no coursing fluid no thought"

Ray Davis, April 2009

Amplifying the Twilight

Curatorial Statement
Brian Andrews & Marc LeBlanc


Human history has etched an expanding curve from myth to science. Its path crosses territories that were once sacred but came to be viewed as either knowledge or superstition. As culture and technology advanced, so did the boundary between what was rationally determined and cosmologically intuited. The evolution of culture and science resides at this fringe, expanding outward, in the twilight where human knowledge begins to break apart into the unknown.


In 1973, writer Arthur C. Clarke declared in his Third Law of Prediction, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The law collapses the differences between a scientist and a magician to milestones on the path leading to modern humanity.


Amplifying the Twilight investigates this dialectic of the romantic and the rational as it is visualized in contemporary art. The exhibition explores what kind of experimental thought and feeling are possible at the boundary of rationalism and "magic", drawing from esoteric and self-made spiritual practices, scientific research stations, and icons from popular science fiction.


David Coyle's video triptych Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, reinterprets the speculations of science fiction as a form of personal horror. Coyle dresses up as the Tin Man, a magician, and a hominid monster, all historical archetypes of technology and its implications. The self-portraits chant “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that”, the infamous quote from Clarke’s 2001, when a computer gains consciousness and murders its human creator. Shashana Chittle and Alison Ruttan’s artistic practices methodically investigate the diffuse boundary of science from opposite sides. Alison Ruttan was artist-in-residence at the Bonobo Research Station at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Her digital print Bred in the Bone humorously documents the parallels of human and primate behavior. Shashana Chittle’s meticulous drawings archive her experience awakening each morning, capturing her fleeting visual perceptions as an amateur scientist recording mythical forms at the edges of her perception. Sayre Gomez and Ryan Fenchel employ the art historical trope of abstraction to illuminate ambiguous structures of the universe, from the microcosm of Fenchel’s OIO, to the expansive macrocosm of Gomez’s Formal Exercise Make and Do.


Amplifying the Twilight can be viewed as a reconciliation between the idealism of romanticism with the realism of modernity; a brief image of the moving edge between what we can think and what is beyond our perceptions.

Brian Andrews & Marc LeBlanc

FEBRUARY: word and art: JORDAN ESSOE

Illegible Spaces (Part One)
A note about Semaphores
By Jordan Essoe

Author’s Note: I wrote this article after receiving multiple requests to issue a more or less comprehensive text about the Semaphores exhibition project. I am indebted to this support, kindness, and interest. Below is the first part of the resulting statement, which focuses on the broad context and content of the project as a whole. Part two, which will be published in the following weeks, will address the individual works in the exhibition. If you have comments or feedback, please write to me at jordan@essoe.com

Introduction

Semaphores is an exhibition project about globalization, physical manifestations of psychological geography, and the legibility of the environment around us. The project questions our relationship to illegible spaces, and how it defines and manufactures exile and empathy. The work is multidisciplinary, and includes works of collage, video, painting, performance, photography, writing, and sculpture; and incorporates materials ranging from oil on canvas and handwriting on notebook paper to sugar cubes, peg board, and shredded brown paper bags. As an exhibition, it has a linear design, with separate galleries intended to be experienced by the viewer in sequence. As a visual exercise, the project pursues a sense of spatial uncertainties and [dis]quiet. Conceptually, the project considers specific economic, political, and military aspects of globalization towards an understanding of communication structures allowed by – and in some cases a byproduct of – free marketeering, intergovernmental agency, and mutual defense imperialism. I’ll begin this note by addressing the general context for the project before moving into a discussion of the individual works.

Communication Failures

The successes of global communication structures are no more or less important as the failures, but it is through looking at the breakdown or limitations of information technologies that we can better understand how illegible spaces in the global village are created and maintained. Communication failure occurs both by error and by fault, but many of the consequences are consistent. Anywhere in the world, for example, insufficient access to education is the single most compelling risk factor connected to poverty. Information asymmetry can and should be thought of as directly enabling wealth concentration. Concentration of wealth forges exiles of both the haves and the have-nots, with dense illegible spaces dividing the population. Therefore, in all instances and to all degrees that communication structures fail to achieve egalitarian exchange of information and reciprocal interconnectivity, they are not inert conditions. They are the conditioning responsible for actualizing a world with nurtured illegible space and manufactured exile.

Failures or flaws of communication structures are not limited to lines or methods of communication not used responsibly, or even limited to systems that are constructed intentionally for deceitful transmission. An appropriate definition of failure also includes a refusal to develop communication systems within and for illegible spaces where none currently exist (with respect paid to maintaining levels of appropriate privacy in accordance with regional culture and international human rights standards). This is an important secondary ethical aspect to the dialog about communications infrastructure, because lack of information not only enables poverty, but also deactivates empathy through the uneven preservation of distance. The promotion of empathy is an attractive replacement for the Chicago school’s brand of self-interest towards the common good, but distance remains one of empathy’s reliable cures. Consequentially, if distance needs to be deactivated in order to promote empathy adequate enough to stimulate the development of interconnectivity, then this is a Catch-22, and a stabilizing effect for illegible spaces.

Distances

It is remarkable how and why distances are enacted and enabled or preserved. Forces of globalization are often described as tools for compressing space and making distances appear smaller. Since we have acquired the technologies and resources to accomplish either compression or inflation of space, distance should be thought of as a potential feature without default value that requires deliberate activation or deactivation. Bodies of government and transnational business do not usually elect to deactivate distance unless it is in their specific self-interest to do so – frequently to make use of an opportunity of unfair advantage – and common citizens do not typically behave much differently. In many cases, to varying degrees, individuals may elect to promote their own isolation and fortify the distance around them. Why? Distance enables private property and a sense of entitlement. Distance enables a sense of individuality and security. Distance disrupts empathy and places it at arm’s length, replacing it with more comfortably egocentric sensations like apathy or guilt or fear. Distance enables robbery, rape, and expulsion to occur in secret.

Even when people do not actively pursue or protect their own isolation, it is sometimes protected for them – by law enforcement, economic restraint, or cultural norms – and this can seemingly validate a feeling of homelessness inside the global village. Illegible spaces between neighbors are promoted by the powerful because illegible space prevents, among other things, popular uprising. Qualitative isolation exists with ubiquity within the elite sectors of the Global North in ways that are defined by concepts of privilege. It is commonly contrived as a privilege to feel divorced from your neighbors, immediate and far.

Displacement

There are different forms and expressions of exile, all representing characteristics of fracture in the global village. Since exile is binary, and defined by which side of a dividing wall you are on, two distinct types of exile are considered by the Semaphores project. The first is psychological exile, typified by a sense of anomie or symptomatic detachment from one’s local, regional, and/or international community. The other is literal, violent, physical expulsion.

Multiple works in this project specifically examine an ongoing crisis in Colombia. In its northwestern region of Chocó, tens of thousands of indigenous Afro-Colombians are being brutally expelled from their agrarian communities at gunpoint. Their homes and natural territory are immediately overturned and converted into palm oil plantations in the service of junta entrepreneurialism. From a global perspective this is, unbearably so, not a fully unique circumstance. There are other contemporary scenes of systematic pillage that similarly confess an expulsion directed by factors of economic globalization – and the peculiar sociopolitical envelope into which the fragile awareness of evictions of this kind tends to disappear into. This specific case in Colombia felt urgently appropriate to the Semaphores project for multiple reasons.

Of primary interest is Colombia’s contradictory proximity to the United States. The U.S. continues to be Colombia’s profound sponsor, primarily in military and “law enforcement” matters, but we have not yet awarded the country a “free-trade” agreement (fortunately, considering that, among other facts, more trade unionists are murdered in Colombia than in anywhere else in the world). You can fly from Miami to Bogotá in 3 ½ hours, but tourist traffic is spare. Ostensibly, a neighbor as physically near and as economically associated with us as Colombia should feel closer. But the informational and cultural geography make it distant, and the purview feels deeply obfuscated.

In shear numbers, Colombia has the second largest internally displaced person population in the world, behind only Sudan. Over four million Colombians are exiled within their country, a figure roughly double of that for Iraq. The tens of thousands of recent victims joining this haunting statistic in Chocó are displaced through a polygonal arrangement: right-wing paramilitaries working in conjunction with the domestic agrofuel industry are employed by the Colombian government and publicly supported by President Alvaro Uribe and his ambition to emulate the lucrative palm oil boom in Malaysia and Indonesia. Their actions are financed, in part, by the United States through its USAID program. If the paramilitaries wish, they execute those landowners that resist or organize against evacuation. Once the target land is stripped and developed into operational plantations, palm oil is harvested for export, primarily to be used as a biofuel or food additive. As an additional convenience, the plantations are useful money laundering fronts for coca trafficking, a more traditional revenue source for paramilitary operatives.

In essence, a coalition of governmental, corporate, and mercenary pirates are eliminating the rightful owners of legible space and restructuring these spaces as foreign, manufacturing exiles. Witnesses are strangers, watching through soiled windows.





Grand Design

Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1940, is used throughout Semaphores as a type of conceptual informant, and many of the works in the project take their titles from the text. The narrative, which Borges plainly suggests is an allegory about totalitarianism, is in this context a useful lens through which to debate the problematic of remaking the world by grand design under the larger heading of globalization. Borges’s story contains myriad literary nuances too intricate to address here with precision, but importantly it is about the charmed conception of a fictional world that manifests control over reality and, with increasing, modular strength, threatens to substitute it completely. The grand design, despite having initially less treacherous intentions, can be described as the promotion and mass manufacture of virulent illegible space.

This new world order is summoned through the careful efforts of a vast secret society of intellectuals dating back to George Delgado (a linguist who in real life proposed and completed an original universal language in the 1650s) and philosopher George Berkeley. The project’s aims were originally limited to the creation of an imaginary country named Uqbar, but two centuries later, on a different continent, the ambition of the idea was revised:

Buckley listened with some disdain as the other man talked, and then burst out laughing at the modesty of the project. He declared that in America it was absurd to invent a country, and proposed the invention of a whole planet.

Tlön is the name of the emerging usurper world, and Orbis Tertius is the title given to the secret society’s project to improvise its blueprint, manufacture evidence of it, and covertly disseminate it. The primary communication lines for distributing the ideas of Tlönist doctrine are encyclopedias, those traditional guides of selective “total” knowledge. As Tlön increases in strength and influence, we are told that some of its more nonsensical cultural geography or self-contradictory concepts are curbed as a way of compromising with the status quo reality. Regardless, the more integrated that our reality and Tlön’s unreality become, the less stable and knowable any of it appears.

The story is narrated in the first-person by a fictional double of Borges, in an almost dry, journalistic tone. Many other characters have real-life counterparts, including Borges’s good friend and sometimes collaborator Bioy Casares (and, as previously suggested, several historical figures). Owing to these and many other illusive exchanges between fact and fiction, and Borges’s recurring play with reflection and metaphors of doubles, the level of acquaintance with one’s environment is hazy (for both character and reader). The instinct to preserve the self, and the sphere of the familiar that compliments it, is put into question.

Due to contact with Tlön, unnatural objects are manifested purely through a mentalist process of hoping for them (extremely heavy cones, made of metal that does not exist in this world), deteriorating relics are preserved simply through the incidental witnessing of them (a stone threshold which lasted as long as it was visited by a beggar, and which faded from site on his death), and the continuity of unique personal identity is replaced with corporate identity (All men, in the climatic instant of coitus, are the same man. All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare). The philosophical ideas Borges pursues with Tlön advance beyond Berkeleian immaterialism (whose chief percipient and anchor is God) into a brand of panspychism that altogether denies the existence of objective, material reality. Hence, Tlönic language refuses all nouns.

Forces of economic globalization (back here in the real world) are directed by either immaterialist or materialist points of view, alternating between them depending on what or whom are being evaluated. Similar to the commonly insensitive mindset of people who are distracted by the complexity of their own lives, business always believes in the existence of its own objective reality, but only sometimes believes in the objective reality for other things and of other people. The materialist worldview is applied bilaterally in instances where strong displays of public empathy make it otherwise difficult to deny the reality of external human consequences. In many other circumstances – where empathy is uncertain, divided, or otherwise illegible or invisible – objective reality beyond the back fence is treated insouciantly as a set of theoretical and profoundly malleable constructs (constructs without nouns). From the perspective of Tlön, our world is its awkward fiction, and from the perspective of international business, native populations in the way of opportunity have fictional rights. From the perspective of the narrator, a witness to terrible corruption from a distance, he or she themselves can feel rendered fictive through their isolation and sense of abject powerlessness.

Trafficking

This exhibition project gained its titled Semaphores because of the irregular history of the word – a concept and a name that has been used for many dissimilar communications technologies over the centuries, from telegraph towers in 18th century France, traffic lights in 19th century England, and today’s digital regulators that manage data flow between multiple computer processors. Importantly, a semaphore is never the message itself, but the method of delivery, and it often dictates the speed and timing of a transmission. Beyond this, its definition is fairly mercurial, and it is easy to begin to think of the word “semaphore” as a prevailing concept or metaphor unto itself, elastic and available for broad interpretation.

Applied to this project about globalization, the title Semaphores is intended to function in two ways. On a purely conceptual level, it describes in general terms an emphasis on communication structures, and asks the viewer to consider the parameters of that proposal in a global context. Secondly, the title presides specifically over a group of constituent interdisciplinary artworks that utilize many different communication technologies and formats towards a unified whole. Yet, of course, contact with each artwork facilitates a signal independent from that whole, which returns us to thoughts of compartmentalization, information asymmetry, and the bifurcated nature of communication traffic.






Jordan Essoe’s Semaphores runs through February 28, 2009 at Ampersand International Art, in San Francisco.

Please visit www.essoe.com or www.ampersandintlarts.com for more information.

Part Two of Illegible Spaces will be published in the following weeks.

JANUARY : word : KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH art : JORDAN ESSOE

http://essoe-semaphores.blogspot.com

http://www.shotgun-review.com/archives/ampersand_international_arts/jordan_essoes_semaphores.html

http://ex-ungue-leonem.blogspot.com/

" Thoroughgoing ignorance about the ways of others is largely a privilege of the powerful"

Kwame Anthony Appiah