the reading:
By paying attention to trash through drawing, we are getting to know the tide and texture of a place. Scanning over debris in the city we register a texture of trash, a collective story, but in one on one encounters we begin to learn something more specific about each object.
In 'Touching Feeling' Eve Sedgwick says "looking at the texture of any object we are subconsciously imagining its manufacture" "..to perceive texture is always, immediately, and de facto to be immersed in a field of active narrative hypothesizing, testing, and re-understanding of how physical properties act and are acted upon over time. To perceive texture is never only to ask or know 'what is it like' nor even just 'how does IT impinge on ME?' Textural perception always explores two other questions as well: 'how did it get that way?' and 'what could I do with it?' " "..I haven't perceived a texture until I've instantaneously hypothesized whether the object I'm perceiving was laminated sedimented extruded granulated polished distressed felted or fluffed up."
There's a change in the quality of knowing and feeling through drawing a subject. Portraiture blends the barriers between us and another body. I used to draw a lot of portraits of people, moving attention slowly across the edges of a person, hand tracing the sightline onto a page. And after you draw someone, there's a sort of tingly intimacy, not a knowing or a familiarity necessarily, but a re-seeing, more like intrigue, like watching a friend perform onstage for the first time. A type of awe! I feel an attachment, or an awe, around the place where we drew trash two years ago, still peering into the tree pits with the same mix of curiosity and familiarity you might have walking up and down the wrack zone of a beach you know well, the same but also always new! Let's see what the disposal tides have left for us around the park here!
~s.lammer
things to look for: pizza box wedged between trash cans, straw stuffed into pen, cracked cup study, environmental tape drawing, bio/synthetic marriage, Jazzy Toes, depicting transparency in the wild
and this is the pidgeon roosting in the ashtray of montez radio. photo credit lena B^)
