The desire to overcomplicate is strong. I’m not sure if it’s innate or trained in me, but I cannot remember a time in my life when my brain wasn’t working on overdrive to find hidden meanings or make multiple connections. Nothing is as it seems. Add to that graduate school training, and the warning never to be “on the nose” and you have an over-complicator.
Yet I’m learning to let materials stand on their own.
Case in point, I’m preparing for an upcoming exhibition, Shift, at Bristol Art Museum July 21-September 11, 2202. It’s been a while since I created a work for exhibition and naturally, I want to display every bit of research I’ve uncovered and every studio test I’ve been working on since Interdependence, 2015 — the ubiquity of concrete and asphalt smothering our shared earth, the privatization of public land and gentrification in North America, the sheer delight of playing with liquid plastic, how asphalt breaks apart in the sun, and my shame at the carbon I spew in the air while traveling to the desolate, vulnerable lands that I post to Instagram.
Yet, I want to bury all of the meaning and demonstrate the complexities of life in my choice of materials.
I watch and coach other artists working through this instinct to add everything but the kitchen sink of their research to an installation. The desire is legitimate. We want people to understand our passion or our meaning, especially when the work is on public display; when our audience did not choose to enter into a gallery or a conversation with contemporary art. At Now + There we like to assume our audience is intelligent but maybe hasn’t yet encountered the complex issue the artist is presenting (e.g., for an upcoming exhibition by Juan Obando, the future of memorials). It requires an artist first narrows their focus to a point an audience can enter into (e.g., covering a memorial) before expanding it again (e.g., what would you put her if this never existed?). This consideration of audience and the way meaning can be misinterpreted goes against our training to complicate and help others embrace the gray area of life.
Yet creating work with an audience in mind can be an act of kindness too.
My final piece for the exhibition is coming into existence, nearing completion, as a portable installation; or as a critic and friend recently described it, a tabletop landscape. The materials and composition are complete. I could pack it up today and ship it out. But my trigger finger is on the pencil. “What if I annotated the surface with facts?” I ask myself? For example: Of the 64 million kilometers of roadways covering the planet, around 25 million are paved. And won’t people want to know that some of the asphalt was taken from Harvard, an institution that has profited off of the erasure and stolen lands of Indigenous Peoples?
But then I remember what it’s like to be on the receiving side of that constant hammer of connections and challenging news. So I turn off NPR, tune into some chill, down-tempo tunes, and let my eyes take over. I rely on the intrinsic qualities of the material – smooth concrete reflecting images of landscapes, and gold leaf highlighting the benefit of roadways that connect us. I let the combination of materials, the art, speak for itself and drop a few tidbits here for anyone who might be curious to learn more.
Yet, my work will always be complex because life is just that: messy, knotty, and exhilaratingly complicated.