JEANNE MARIE WASILIK
Statement
My work has grown from my interest in how all language both grants and denies access. I am also interested in the gap from the moment of perception to the moment of comprehension.
My first body of work in this theme consists of rubbings in graphite and pastel that examine the ways represented language—whether embodied in gestural mark, Braille, Morse code, or a simple dot—might be transcribed, read, and received. In these pieces my process began with constructing a reproducible template, such as a low relief, an incised pattern, or a stencil. The works produced from these matrixes explore the intersections of word and image, and the visual and the haptic.
I also make paintings that address the codes of text, figure, and ground. I paste painted discs on fabric that spell out words and phrases in Braille. I then shape the fabric, light it, and paint it as a still life. These paintings—oils on burlap—play the content of text and language against the content of perspective, understood as both a descriptive and a rhetorical idiom. This work led to a series of “blind drawings” from art-historical images. In these drawings I project the image onto paper in a darkened room. I then make the drawing in the dark, using my fingertips, without being able to distinguish between what is projected and the marks I am making. Current drawings in this vein include an ongoing series of blind and double-blind drawings done in the woods. In the double-blind drawings I run the fingers of my left hand over the contours of rocks, sticks, trees, and leaves while simultaneously drawing their perceived contours with my right hand, without looking at either the object or the drawing.
Another ongoing series are small drawings in inks and water-based encaustics, on vellum or coated paper. The images are found images, images from the news, and occasionally photos I’ve taken with my phone. They are evocations and invocations. The most recent of this group are fragments taken from late works by Goya, particularly Los Disparates. In this political and social climate I feel a need for signs that may be fragmentary and in motion but are nonetheless embodied. Some of the works after Goya are more developed, others are more minimal, but all are unmistakably bodies in extremis. They are bodies that have been subjected to violence, bodies that are twisted, falling, broken. They, too, live in the spaces between perception and comprehension.