Drawings: 2011-2012

Here's a selection of drawings I made between 2011-2012. All drawings are on 9 x 11" paper, made with a Bic fine tipped pen. A rationale for the drawings is included.

Debora Alanna - Drawings from 2011-2012: pen on paper from Embellish4art Enterprises

Jeroen Witvliet - Days - Slide Room Gallery - August 2012 - Review by Debora Alanna

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Jeroen Witvliet show “Days” reviewed by Debora Alanna

    

Entering Days, Jeroen Witvliet’s epic drawings loom, overpower any thought brought to the Slide Room Gallery threshold, drawing one completely into his disquieting and imposing work. Drenched with charcoal biting stark, thick white paper, attentively drawn distressed entanglements emphasize spectacle, vistas of loaded feelings conspicuous in heaps of tousled matter and defeated branches. There is a line in Aristotle’s poetics Part IV that this work embodies, ‘Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity’. ([1]) With commitment to detail, Witvliet produces contemplative stanzas of a tragic poem. Days drawings are knotty discussions about ruin providing startling lucid factious narratives. His imagery taunts our perception of how days of time influence disaffecting internal conflicts.

Unlike Webster and Noble's trash pieces that create coy figurative shadows projected from the waste configuration, Witvliet’s debris piles, although seemingly rendered as haphazard, are judicious figuration explorations as well as suspended ground, a composite relation. With the intensely described veneer of ruin the remnants of civilization’s abandon and forestal foray figuratively repose as mounds. Versed in quantification and evaluation of remains, Days untitled drawings exhibit a range of possibilities for correlated dissemination, while considering its impact, and resolve, heroically complex.

From Russell Perkins', Adorno's Dreams and the Aesthetic of Violence. Telos 155 (Summer 2011). :
Adorno is never merely a passive bystander to suffering. [...] we see that insight into violence only becomes possible when neutrality is foregone for standpoints of ambivalent participation, and thus that the suspension of the category of witness becomes the very condition of possibility for testimony.
Theodor W. Adorno, (1903 –1969), German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist, known for his critical theories of cultural industry, with Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), had insight into the passive danger imposed on human needs by mass consumption.([2]) Compositional vocabulary, whether sound or visual composition, relates the audience to cultural dissonance when presented with intense scenarios as seen in Days. An Adorno like metaphor, the passivity of elegant debris ambivalently engages is a witness to violent disregard, a poignantly portrayed testament - Schoenbergian atonality personified. WithDays, we see that Witvliet also is not a bystander to suffering because his work is a demonstration of universal untamed forces that disseminate within us all. Days is evidence, imagery dishevelled with violent overtones.

Witvliet’s Days has uncanny erotic tension within the load of implicit piles of expressive remnants’ and/or broken branches coexisting, memories upon memories tangled. In Ralf Waldo Emerson’s poem, Days, he speaks of his ‘pleached’ garden. Witvliet’s pleached wreckage, woven with civilization’s discard and denuded trees is the Garden, reverential intimacy scorned. The politics of duplicity is inscribed in the torn and stinging lines he makes whipping up from the white paper wasteland, spilling shadow.

Orgone, Reich & Eros, Wilhelm Reich’s Theory of Life Energy by W. Edward Mann, on page 159, quotes from an article by Richard Martin, “Be Kind to Plants – Or You Could Cause a Violet to Shrink,” in The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, February 2, 1972 to substantiate Reich’s claim that ‘orgone energy pulsates through all living systems and that all are interdependent, existing in a kind of energy ocean.’ Wilhelm Reich called his hypothesized universal life force orgone. He claimed orgone is imparted from all organic material, which ostensibly can be captured with a booth-like device to restore psychological health.

Two of Witvliet’s drawings are plants under glass, or see-through boxes and there is another drawing of a seemingly abandoned greenhouse snugly enclosed by a mishmash of forest debris – the residual forest darkness standing distant. Hans Haacke's "Condensation Cube" (1963), displays transformative energy as condensation, collected or at least contained, without vegetation because Haacke has transplanted weather indoors, detached from growth, and presumably orgone. Witvliet’s greenhouse rendering, with this theory, is a very big organic energy collection box with a spiritual aesthetic seen in Gerhard Richter’s Iceberg in Fog (Eisberg im Negel) (2002). Human interaction has forced the forest surround into submission, while the trees still stand behind the greenhouse are expectant reminders of how energy can be cultivated, although, directed by human foible amassed energy can also abuse, destroy. Witvliet measures our collective psychological health and tells us the forest is shrinking, and our energy ocean is as segregated and minimal as a Haacke condensation cube. This is not a theory.

In a video performance, a reinvention of Allan Kaprow’s Art is Life (1964/2008), at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) presented by Outpost for Contemporary Art on April 19, 2008, a segment called “Household Revisited”, where (according to MOCA) ‘Peaceniks, Treehuggers and other Believers’, in the midst of household debris (some human size), chant:

We lie where we will
What if every cell in our body is in dialogue with all there is?
Imagine the world you can’t imagine.
Imagine being accepted.
Junk, piles of people.

Household remnants strewn and piled in a field was a rebellion against the accoutrements of banality, while the Believers implore for liberation from the idea that people represent themselves by what they own. Witvliet’s immobilized masses of liberated stuff, many pieces laded in handsome adjacent squares, networks of distribution, and even muddled masses spare the association of ‘Junk, piles of people’. Figurative, yes, but his imagination has been long liberated from literal references, enabling mottled shreds of interactions to blanket the mounds.

On 11 September 2012, The UK daily, the Telegraph reported ([3]),”the massive floating islands of garbage, some almost 70 miles in length, caused by last month’s tsunami in Japan, which are causing chaos in shipping lanes in the Pacific Ocean, as they slowly head for the west coast of the America.” As Witvliet’s piles seem to float, they do incite a kind of chaos, blockage, a revelation of a disturbance and trauma. In his artist statement, he refers to the image within his refuse drawings as, “A raft lost at sea.”

In Jorge Luis Borges’ preface to "The Invention of Morel", a novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, about an island of intrigue, he writes that full freedom leads to full disaster, global warming’s weather demise contributing, as the news item above attests. What Borges calls the fictitious nature of politics as a means to freedom through the ordering of society is punishingly unable to originate mysterious, and reasonable facts the author, Casares can contrive. We have to wonder about the politics of materialism that the floating ocean island of debris in the news above created, and what disorder allows the menace to continue to pollute. Witvliet’s islands of dishevelled matter are the result of unrestrained loads, where chaos has created the enigma of mess and confusion. What Witvliet creates is a delicate wisdom, as Borges would say, to transcribe intangible, mysterious veracity. Magritte said, ‘The mind loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.” ([4]) Witvliet, akin to Borges’ Casares, renders the unknown as archetypal insight and with his mindful power of depiction, articulates the mysterious with demonstrative candour.

In Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, Enigma, hiding the name of a fellow poet in its text, to express how she was unacknowledged in her lifetime, he writes, “through all the flimsy things we see at once”[...]”Trash of all Trash”. [...]”But this is now – you may depend upon it –/Stable, opaque, immortal – all by dint/Of the dear names that he concealed within’t.” The enigma, here being the baffling unknown reason his friend’s poetry was not recognized in spite of her profundity. Witvliet’s drawings, too are veiled gems, enigmatic discourses on life’s inconsistency and the mortal need for rapport. As we, with ambivalence render our vision opaque, we are reticent to see the concealments of powerful, universal truths in perilous collections of thought as his piles of debris describe. Witvliet’s Days is significant, enduring memory that pictures weighted introspection. His denouement of our collective tragedy, the revelation is confrontational pain. Through the mourning of Days, we are wakening.

---

[1] http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html
[2] Adorno, T. W., with Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. 242.
[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/8437632/Massive-floating-rubbish-islands-from-Japan-tsunami-spotted-on-Pacific.html
[4] René Magritte (1898-1967), Belgian surrealist painter. Quoted in Suzi Gablik, Magritte, ch. 1 (1970).

Slide Room Gallery
Vancouver Island School of Art
Victoria BC
August 2012

Jeroen's website : www.structure365.com

Video - Everything Else is Winter

Exhibit-v produced and posted this video of my show, "Everything Else is Winter" at Xchanges Gallery.
http://www.exhibit-v.ca/

Review of "Everything Else is Winter" by Philip Willey - from Exhibit-v

http://exhibit-v.blogspot.ca/2012/08/debora-alanna-everything-else-is-winter.html

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Debora Alanna - Everything Else Is Winter – by Philip Willey

    
 
One thinks of Arte Povera, the art movement that grew up mainly in Italy in the Sixties as a reaction to the elitism of the art world and to more general social injustice. But whereas Arte Povera makes a political statement Deborah Alanna seems more concerned with the emotive power of materials. Her work bursts of the walls. There is something primeval about it…..a primitive force that can’t quite be contained. As she says in a statement: "My sensibilities are founded in the unconcealed world that has dimensions to be discovered. Disparate thoughts can suggest possibilities I love to explore." What, one wonders, is she doing in Victoria with its well-manicured calm?

She left Vancouver because her life there was becoming too intense she says. She needed calm and detachment and like so many she found Victoria a good place to make art. It has been a productive move for her as scores of preliminary drawings attest.

Alanna has held solo exhibitions of sculpture in Kazakhstan, Italy, France, India, and Canada and participated in group exhibitions in USA, Brazil, Spain, France, Italy and Canada. She describes herself as a sculptor primarily but finding herself restricted by lack of space. So for some time she was limited to drawing on paper.

The drawings appear to be studies, ideas and imaginings which may lead to future three dimensional work. Forms in the drawings are fundamentally organic and somehow reminiscent of Anish Kapoor’s refined seedpod-like creations. The larger paintings are sculptural in the way of Schnabel and Kiefer where various materials are compounded to produce a rich texture that is at once spontaneous and the result of studied choices. Contrasts are stark and every piece in the show has visual impact. The titles, one suspects, come after or during the fact.

The overall impression is one of strength. Underlying all the work one senses a kind of magma.the primeval brew at the center of the universe. The emotional energy in this work is quite overpowering really and it requires a conscious effort to resist being engulfed. The paintings become progressively more sculptural as Alanna starts to concentrate on an upcoming show in Iceland to be called, appropriately, ‘Lava and Light’.


Xchanges Gallery - August 2012

"Everything Else is Winter"

https://www.facebook.com/events/444279672261325/

• Exhibition of drawings & paintings in various media by Debora Alanna http://embellish4art.blogspot.ca/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/embellish4art/ This exhibition includes drawings on paper, with bic pen and oil pastel, and mixed media paintings. All work is for sale. Posters of selected works will be available, as well. "Everything Else is Winter" is a body of work produced during and just after a year spent in a transitional shelter due to traumatic events, and 6 months after leaving. All works explore emotional states through this journey. “My sensibilities are founded in the unconcealed world that has dimensions to be discovered. Disparate thoughts can suggest possibilities I love to explore. I am a conceptual thinker; multidimensionality, space and time are used in the realm of my art practice. Conventional thoughts about material use are continually challenged in my work.” Debora graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Experimental Art. She has held solo exhibitions in Italy, France, India, Kazakhstan and Canada, and group exhibitions in India, France, Spain, USA, Brazil and Canada. Title of this exhibition is courtesy of Joey Goodwin. August 6 at 12:00pm until August 11 at 5:00pm

Drawings - Victoria BC 2011

Absorbed, drawing to mark out a secluded life amongst strangers, segregated by dispossession, I allow arduous thought to transform, become tenuous acts of creation.

Fright wakens and slinks into weedy grounds where positive acts strive to flourish. Black and white lines enable my transition into new understanding. Drawn from some unacknowledged terrain where I am past worrying, the drawings reshape tolerance and capture my curious nature, where buoyancy supports insight and breathes delight.

Here's some drawings I made this year...

Drawing.

For the past few months daily drawing with a black Bic pen in a notebook has been a means to explore what I think and feel. I have not been able to write much, except a few (20 since last spring) art reviews. Making one work for the Deluge Lost LP Cover show, which did not sell - can you guess which one is mine? (Any takers?!) has been my sole sculptural output since Edmonton. I would like to blame the weather, the lack of studio space - monetary concerns. However, there is nothing stopping me, should I want to use found materials and wrap them around a telephone pole, for example, or trench sand into forms or use myself as a sculpture, performing some ritualistic incantation, calling the muses to my rescue.These drawings are my collected dream of work yet to come, and with some internal reconstruction, this may yet happen.

Seeking Kali

 

This is my contribution to the Seeking Kali exhibition.
Oil Pastel - 16 x 24 inches - August 2010. 

Seeking Kali 

Summer drawings for new sculpture

Here's some drawings I did over the summer that are more in my own sensibility (as opposed to trying to figure out what a client wants, and executing the work from descriptors someone else provides). I envision this work to be large - at least 3 x 12 metres. Thinking of using cement fabric and translucent cement. 

More marker drawings - Preliminary development of installations

These drawings are beginnings of a complex installations.

Materials are chosen tofurther develop the concept.

Size is determined by location.

These works would be composed of light (type to be determined),

glass and metal. Possibly other materials would be integrated,

depending on the size and location of the final work.

Prelude to sculpture drawings

Here's some drawings that are preliminary ideas that may become sculpture or installations. Some themes are reflected previous work.  New drawings replenish the concepts. This is a way to start thinking about making new work. The minimal colour allows concentration on form.

Verrocchio show

Working world

The Addiction office was a week of sleepless nights, the images of 20 something girls, trying not to look stoned, waiting for their methadone 'scripts... Somehow, they chose drugs over living through their nemesis. Heart wrenching. One week of being especially cheerful and accommodating is over.

I must find another way to make a living.

New prospects next week. Friendlier and more diverse. I am still stunned, wondering how those near and dear will skirt that frightful, intoxication of the drug induced euphoria, remaining true to their enchanting selves.

Here are some drawings:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/embellish4art/sets/72157605667281192/