MFA Thesis Installation; May 2019

Wandering, collecting: traversing the spiral of history is a physical manifestation of my research into critical theory’s ties to Jewish mysticism. This text-based installation is comprised of 10 perfect bound books and 5 vinyl concrete poems that call attention to the secularization of the mystical, mythic past. This installation takes the form of a dream city built of texts, their locations dictated by their location in my memory palace. Mysticism redefined Jewish practices when sages, mystics, and kabbalists challenged the universal authority of the written words of Jewish law. Through a process of secularization, critical theorists such as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida have called upon mystic practices when they have used their theory to challenge the growing presence of authoritarianism and question the way the world around them functioned.

I embody the flâneur (which was itself central to Jewish theorists’ understanding of the world) and the wanderer as I “walk” in and between the texts, searching for connections. My process is that of literary montage. As I wander each text, I search for phrases that can enter into a constellation with the rest of my research. I then create a space for these texts to inhabit. Words are central to this work, for mysticism tells us that letters hold power. I harness this power by magnifying texts from books into large vinyl poetry. Mythic in size, these poems channel the emotive qualities within, ready to be consumed by the viewer.

This project is not complete, and may never be. As with Benjamin, I am suffocated by the impossibility of my endeavor, for though there are hints of progress, there are no solutions, no singular thesis statement that can be “proven” when you try to merge the mystical and the theoretical. Even with this, I am drawn to wander, to collect text and treat it as form; to open up words and explore the past. This dream-city will keep growing. I will continue to wander its streets and alleyways, hoping that one day, all the work leads to a single product, a single book from the many.

Digital Print Installation, March 2019, Dimensions varied

“The idea thus belongs to a fundamentally different world from that which it apprehends. ... Its significance can be illustrated with an analogy. Ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars.”

-Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 2003), 34.

Layered commentary, mystical archive on Other Places, utopias.

A collaborative installation with Laura Medina, Vanessa Englund, and Marie Conner; curated by Victor Maldonado as a part of the Utopian Visions Art Fair for TBA 2018.

Texts Included:

Dusza, Erin M. “Pan-Slavism in Alphonse Mucha’s Slav Epic.” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 13, no. 1 (Spring 2014). http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring14/dusza-on-pan-slavism-in-alphonse-mucha-s-slav-epic.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Diacritics 16, no. 11 (Spring 1986): 22–27.

“Jan Kollár and Literary Panslavism.” The Slavonic Review 6, no. 17 (December 1927): 336–43.

Levussove, M. S. The New Art of an Ancient People: The Work of Ephraim Moses Lilien. New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1906.

Pražák, Albert. “The Slovak Sources of Kollár’s Pan-Slavism.” The Slavonic and East European Review 6, no. 18 (March 1928): 579–92.

A Mystical Archive.

Shown as part of Group Show: please read before, in conjunction with Converge 45, Gallery 157, PNCA. August-September 2018.

Works by Anna Gray + Ryan Wilson Paulsen, Alejandra Arias Sevilla, Julian Adoff, and Russell Wood. Curated by Graduate Curatorial Fellows Kelly Brand + Qamuuqin Maxwell.

Texts Included:

Adnan, Etel. “The Unfolding of an Artist’s Book.” Discourse 20, no. 1/2 (Winter and Spring 1998): 6–27.

Assmann, Jan. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” Translated by John Czaplicka. New German Critique, no. 65 (1995): 125–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/488538.

Batorska, Danuta. “Zofia Stryjeńska: Princess of Polish Painting.” Woman’s Art Journal 19, no. 2 (1998): 24–29. https://doi.org/10.2307/1358402.

Chrostowska, S. D. “Stanisław Brzozowski, Philosopher of History, Myth, and Will.” New Literary History 36, no. 4 (2005): 521–42.

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. 1. MIT Press paperback ed. October Books. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.

Derrida, Jacques. Paper Machine. Cultural Memory in the Present. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Reprinted. Routledge Classics. London: Routledge, 2005.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. “The Surviving Image: Aby Warburg and Tylorian Anthropology.” Oxford Art Journal 25, no. 1 (2002): 61–69.

Higgins, Hannah. The Grid Book. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009.

Krauss, Rosalind. “The Motivation of the Sign.” In Picasso and Braque, a Symposium, edited by William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe, and Lynn Zelevansky, 261–86. New York: Museum of Modern Art : Distributed by H.N. Abrams, 1992.

Lubar, Robert S. “Unmasking Pablo’s Gertrude: Queer Desire and the Subject of Portraiture.” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (1997): 57–84. https://doi.org/10.2307/3046230.

Lubin, David M. “Masks, Mutilation, and Modernity: Anna Coleman Ladd and the First World War.” Archives of American Art Journal 47, no. 3/4 (2008): 4–15.

Mather, David. “Analogies.” In Experience: Culture, Cognition, and the Common Sense, 57–71. MIT Press, 2016.

Mather, David. “Carlo Carrà’s Conscience.” In Nothing but the Clouds Unchanged: Artists in World War I, 88–95. Getty Publications, 2014.

Mather, David. “Mobilizing Desire in Boccioni’s ‘Small Dress Shoe + Urine.’” Getty Research Journal 6 (January 1, 2014): 185–94. https://doi.org/10.1086/675801.

Nemerov, Alexander. “Ground Swell: Edward Hopper in 1939.” American Art 22, no. 3 (2008): 50–71. https://doi.org/10.1086/595807.

Nemerov, Alexander. “Vanishing Americans: Abbott Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Attraction of Camouflage.” American Art 11, no. 2 (1997): 51–81.

Rampley, Matthew. “Archives of Memory: Walter Benjamin;s Arcades Project and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas.” In The Optic of Walter Benjamin, edited by Alex Coles. De-, Dis-, Ex-, [edited by Alex Coles & Richard Bentley] ; Vol. 3. London: Black Dog Publ, 1999.

Rampley, Matthew. “From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg’s Theory of Art.” The Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (1997): 41–55. https://doi.org/10.2307/3046229.

Ruthner, Clemens. “Central Europe Goes Postcolonial: New Approaches to the Habsburg Empire Around 1900.” Cultural Studies 16, no. 6 (November 1, 2002): 877–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/0950238022000034237.

Silverman, Debora L. “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part I.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 18, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2011): 139–81. https://doi.org/10.1086/662515.

Silverman, Debora L. “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part II.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 19, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 2012): 175–95. https://doi.org/10.1086/668060.

Silverman, Debora L. “Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness: African Lineages of Belgian Modernism, Part III.” West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 20, no. 1 (Spring-Summer 2013): 3–61. https://doi.org/10.1086/670975.

Tagg, John. “The Archiving Machine; or, The Camera and the Filing Cabinet.” Grey Room, no. 47 (2012): 24–37.

Thompson, Michael. “The 2014 Whitney Biennial: The Book as a Medium in Contemporary American Art.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 109, no. 2 (June 2015): 147–92.

Walsh, Taylor. “Small Fires Burning: Bruce Nauman and the Activation of Conceptual Art.” October 163 (March 1, 2018): 21–48. https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO_a_00316.

May 2018
Digital print, image transfer, perfect bound book.

Seeking to explore commentaries around read texts, “Commentaries on ‘Art Nouveau, Art of Darkness’” provides a book devoid of Deborah Silverman’s original text. Instead, the looker-reader sees the researcher-artist's own internal dialogues and marginalia (some of Silverman's text is kept for emphasis on specific content. Included with the book is a foldout system map which presents some main elements pulled out by the researcher-artist. Hints of images surrounding the map (the pattern also taken from the article) and are meant to guide the looker-reader through the reading of the text through the eyes and thoughts of another.

Installation, April 2018
Plinth Gallery, Portland, Oregon.

As part of my continued exploration into the notions that theory and research contain mystical qualities, I continued my pursuit of conducting research into the writings and art of some of the twentieth century's chief Jewish scholars: Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, and Edmond Jabès. Pairing their written work with abstracted visuals from Ephraim Moses Lilien and my personal annotations from my reading of their works, I ask how their theories of power, print, and exile were impacted by their Jewishness -- and how that parallels my own scholarship. 

breathing, thinking, living lie explores the early stages of scholarly research into the nation state by connecting twentieth-century nationalist movements with current phenomena of right-wing nationalism and xenophobia. A parallel, theoretical framework based upon Adorno’s concept of the Lie anchors the work within Julian’s activities within both the Visual Studies and Critical Studies programs. This interactive installation places the viewer into the cyclical nature of history as an active agent within these reconstructed and repeated events. 

March 2018
Series of laser-cut woodcut emboss/deboss prints with 2 color annotation-poem screen prints.

----

The Woodcut is designed after a print by Alfons Mucha, Poster for 'The Slav Epic Exhibition' in Brno, 1930
The screen prints are found poems from text by Edmond Jabès

March 2018
Series of laser-cut woodcut emboss/deboss prints with 2 color annotation-poem screen prints.

----

The Woodcut is designed after a print by EM Lilien, Illustration of te Memorial Flame (Kodesh le'Ami)
The screen prints are found poems from text by Edmond Jabès

March 2018
Series of laser-cut woodcut emboss/deboss prints with 2 color annotation-poem screen prints.

----

The Woodcut is designed after a print by EM Lilien, Zionist Girl
The screen prints are found poems from text by Edmond Jabès

February 2018
Silkscreen and Relief on glass
Individual glass prints: 10" x 8" 
Sculpture: 

Documentation by: Mario Gallucci

October 2017 - Present

November 2017 - Present

As I read and research, I will present share fragments of the annotated texts, out of context of their original sources, on my Instagram feed. Accompanying the image is the citation for the reading so that others may join me in a collaborative reading experience. 

April 2017

- with a focus on the contemporaries Luba Lukova, Reza Abedini, and Shepard Fairey and their art historic iconographic links

December 2016

Wall collage; 99"x153"

The taxonomical art historic identifiers are extremely critical to a study of art history, but they present their own challenges because no one term can capture a complete picture and are therefore flawed. Through identifying the lineage of style that led to the work of Luba Lukova, Reza Abedini, and Shepard Fairey I hope to show the cyclical nature of design movements. Stylistic elements used by these contemporaries can be linked to work completed in the 1890s.

In assigning each artist to specific art historical movements/periods/styles, I am able to discover where the taxonomy is lacking as well as how much overlap exists. As can be seen by the Visualization Timeline, and through comparison with the artist sheets, the styles in the taxonomy had flawed boarders, and would often evolve to form the next style; hence the overlapping labels.

or Analyzing Trends in Historic Popular Print Culture and Judaica for the Creation of an Alternative Narrative of Diasporic Jews

October 2016

Wall collage; Dimensions: 59"x101"

With the aim to create a poster that utilizes the practices of printed ephemera as well as the cultural elements of Jewish folk art, I found myself attempting to create work that brought Judaism into popular culture. The install cloud connects art historical iconography of turn of the century Parisian posters with Jewish iconography. The result, the center image, is a poster that features the style and form of a Jules Chéret poster, but filled with Jewish icons. By bringing Jewish heritage into the ephemeral work of the poster, I hope to bring about discussions of the utilization of culture and heritage as tools for the designer to deliver a narrative to the viewer through the idea of the aestheticization of politics

In art history, it is standard practice to have your research rooted in one to one iconographic comparisons. While this is necessary, there are times where a broader comparison would be helpful. With the use of Software Studies Initiative's ImageJ and ImagePlot software, I am able to use mathematical formulas to collect data from image sets and then plot them on polar and square axes. From these plot sets, I can then move forward with iconographic research.

This research often forms the background and sketches for my archive installations as the plots offer insight into relationships that the eye can only begin to see.

What makes a poster? Through an intense study of dissection and combination, I experiment with what it really means to make a poster. Then by hanging each dissected layer in suspension, the flat and ephemeral becomes sculptural and everlasting. Is the significance in the legibility of the poster? what happens when text is flipped and turned upside down - is it still legible?

In a desire to expand the conversation of art history objects into a larger context of how world events influence artist, I looked at two artworks from the Psychedelic poster era - BG-51 and BG-75 by Wes Wilson and Bonnie MacLean. By projecting a cellulose acetate newsreel over the posters, this merges their identities into one that is reciprocally dependent on the other.

As a research exercise, I looked into the history of the Tarot card and hoped to find connections between the arcana and artists of history. I would then create a card that includes artwork of a similar style they were known for.