This/ That/ These/ Those
Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn AL
Summer 2016
I was invited by curator Scott Bishop to participate in an exhibition titled "Call and Response" at the JCSM. Each artist was able to select a work from the museum collection and create a piece inspired by it. I selected three engravings by Pierre Jean Francois Turpin. The installation was completed with assistance from Marley Livingston and Catherine Root.
The piece was accompanied by the following statement:
The first real important words that I learned living in Italy and learning italian were questo and quella which mean this (one) and that (one). Paired with pointing at something you want to eat, they are wonderfully powerful words that can get you almost anything.
What I love about scientific illustrations is how specific they are. They say this one and that one with such confidence. Their designs are beautiful, stiff, ordered, and generally so unlike what they depict. They often forego expression, leaving no choice but to totally and completely accept what you are being shown. This (one) is fact. Though I appreciate the sturdiness of facts and the reliability of recorded language to communicate them from generation to generation, I can’t help but acknowledge the gulf between naming a thing and knowing it. We still don’t know what half the stuff is buried in the Earth, how it got there, who put it there, if they had a good life, let alone the stuff that ends up in a closet, an attic, a basement, only found when you move out, when someone dies, or when you want to renovate something old for something new. For all the times we found things, dusted them off and labeled them, or the times we sliced a berry to make a diagram of its insides, or killed and mounted a bird with wire to make it look alive so we could study it to make a drawing to tell others about the life and habits of that bird, despite the research, the writing, the museums and libraries, as many times as we’ve done all these things, the orderly curation of things still doesn’t capture the entire picture. We can name a lot more than we know.
In my experience, I hope to balance knowing with naming, abstraction with exactness, research with story. I want to recognize those parts that can’t quite be understood, labeled, or named, those parts that make us incapable of more than pointing and saying: this one, that one.
"This/That/These/Those" screen-printed cut paper wheat pasted on walls with framed prints.
Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn AL
Summer 2016
I was invited by curator Scott Bishop to participate in an exhibition titled "Call and Response" at the JCSM. Each artist was able to select a work from the museum collection and create a piece inspired by it. I selected three engravings by Pierre Jean Francois Turpin. The installation was completed with assistance from Marley Livingston and Catherine Root.
The piece was accompanied by the following statement:
The first real important words that I learned living in Italy and learning italian were questo and quella which mean this (one) and that (one). Paired with pointing at something you want to eat, they are wonderfully powerful words that can get you almost anything.
What I love about scientific illustrations is how specific they are. They say this one and that one with such confidence. Their designs are beautiful, stiff, ordered, and generally so unlike what they depict. They often forego expression, leaving no choice but to totally and completely accept what you are being shown. This (one) is fact. Though I appreciate the sturdiness of facts and the reliability of recorded language to communicate them from generation to generation, I can’t help but acknowledge the gulf between naming a thing and knowing it. We still don’t know what half the stuff is buried in the Earth, how it got there, who put it there, if they had a good life, let alone the stuff that ends up in a closet, an attic, a basement, only found when you move out, when someone dies, or when you want to renovate something old for something new. For all the times we found things, dusted them off and labeled them, or the times we sliced a berry to make a diagram of its insides, or killed and mounted a bird with wire to make it look alive so we could study it to make a drawing to tell others about the life and habits of that bird, despite the research, the writing, the museums and libraries, as many times as we’ve done all these things, the orderly curation of things still doesn’t capture the entire picture. We can name a lot more than we know.
In my experience, I hope to balance knowing with naming, abstraction with exactness, research with story. I want to recognize those parts that can’t quite be understood, labeled, or named, those parts that make us incapable of more than pointing and saying: this one, that one.
"This/That/These/Those" screen-printed cut paper wheat pasted on walls with framed prints.
