Selected Presentations

INTRODUCTION

Over the past several years I’ve found myself engaged in a re-visioning of the world that required me to scan across a wide cultural landscape for information, ideas. and interrogations that affirm and inform my own feminist, social, political, and psychic agendas. I have always believed that art and life are inseparable and that art could be about more than itself – in fact it had to be in order to survive an any meaningful sense. I’ve been able to embrace many different visions and inform my paintings from multiple sources, including Donna Haraway’s laboratory of the future. By bringing into form an informed and integrated understanding of my subjects, I hope to fashion webs of connection to others

My painting is not about learning new techniques or technologies per se, which is the modernist approach, nor is it pimping for technology like those who assume that new media or materials automatically set the agenda for art. In a society that increasingly is dependent upon the link between cognition and seeing through amazing new imaging technologies, I want to create images that trouble, resist and disturb and offer provisional visions of love, hope, and well-being. The world has changed and we are all transformed by these new technical visualizations like computerized simulations, video, miraculous new medical imaging devices, LANDSAT photos, satellite weather maps, galaxy simulations, micro-cinematography, and many more.

All of this machining disembodies the lived body. And the coding of vision derived from them suggest that visual aptitude and learning is not just an aesthetic luxury, but may be a matter of life and death – as in the reading of images by radiologists, meteorologists, and environmentalist, just to name a few. In visually diagnostic disciplines, manual, perceptual, and mental operations are centrally involved with revealing, structuring, and interpreting signs and symptoms that cannot be written. Thus it follows that the connection between visible surface and invisible depth becomes crucial. In order to discover and exhibit the inarticulate relationship of interior to exterior, idea to form, private pathos to public patterns, from local events to global ramifications, visual skills and new critical thinking become necessary.

These new technologies of visioning are not without disturbing ethical questions and ultimate consequences that few, if any, can fully anticipate. The immediate implications of prenatal screening, genetic engineering and LANDSAT photos come to mind. There are sinister implications of a technophilia that frequently attends the introduction of new technologies. Increasingly we are controlled by disembodied information such as public opinion polls, actuarial charts, and electronic stock markets: Weber’s Iron Maiden of bureaucratic rationality now comes woven of pulsing threads of digitalized information in cyber space. This is perhaps counter-balanced by, as I’ve already suggested, new ways of seeing and of communicating what has been seen. This ranges from leaving the Earth in order to view the Earth as a living, breathing thing to the specification of the potential links between the gene and life. But this is clearly not a question of choice as much as one of trying to understand and finding ways to share that understanding.

Art historian, Barbara Maria Stafford finds the role of the visual artist in the late 20th Century to be as important as that of the early Renaissance. “The visual artist,” she writes, “who else will demonstrate that one does not necessarily become dumb watching? Who else will show the need for visual aptitude, not just literacy? Who else will teach the difference between empty merchandizing or narcotic plasmic propaganda and the constitutive arts, encouraging and actively persuading the actively engaged beholder to think?” She observes that art is constitutive of the cognitive and that it requires mental and manual skill to construct.

I call my work “Metaphoric Realism.” I”m trying to create metaphors that chart new ways of thinking and change the symbolic order. Visual metaphors call upon the beholder to combine and synthesize experiences that analysis has fragmented or dissected. Metaphors can be a powerful means of understanding the rationally ungraspable. They offer insight into the evolution of a phenomenological sense of being in the world. They are both a mode of persuasion and a catalyst for change. Metaphors are hybrids, messy combinations that threaten a vision of a homogeneous world. Metaphorology opens up a wide and truly cross- disciplinary horizon, which moves easily from the temporal zones of past and present to future and back again. Metaphors embody multiple intelligences and allow us to see how others think and feel through many lenses.

I like the idea of engagement and being in informed touch with multiple fields of knowledge and the need for skills and craft to make the content known, instead of the dumbing-down and dragging of nets across the surface of culture as seen in much current art. Underneath a work of art are traces of what shaped it. And art, allied with various sources, can serve as a vibrant shaper of knowledge. Given the importance and power of metaphoric languages, we should never turn from asking, “Whose metaphors?”

The Paintings

Click the images to view in lightbox.

I. The Daphnes, oil on canvas, 58″ X 72″, 1991.

We live in an age of coding, decoding, and recoding of nearly continuous surveillance and voyeurisms. This painting has three titles. The first of these is The Daphnes and refers to the old myth of a woman, Daphne, turning into a tree while being pursued by Apollo. The women in the painting were some of my sister fellows at the Bunting Institute. The forest and the little waterfall are reminiscent of a painting by the Renaissance artist Fra Fillipo Lippi. Like the World Wide Web, the pathways in this painting are interactive and one must search for relationships in interpreting the moment. The military helicopters search out in order to survey, defoliate, deflower and control these unruly women who are resisting in miraculous ways. The central figure is posed similarly to a painting by Botticelli of Mary Magdalene holding on to the foot of the cross – a transfigured tree. The second title is A radical avoidance of the male gaze. The creatures wandering the woods are some of the extinct species found on the Burgess shale, described in Stephen Jay Gould’s (1989 Wonderful Life). Had they survived, and it appears by chance alone they did not, we would have looked very different. The pink creatures are called Hallucinagenia. The third title is Dickheads are Extinct.

II. Venus, oil on masonite, 14 1/2 X 10 1/2, 1992.

There is no final portrait of any person that represents the totality of the sitter. There are only partial glimpses into the lived experiences of our bodies. Yet we are a society obsessed with bodily images, images and representations which are used to manipulate our bodily life as is all to apparent in the lives of anorexic women and the commercial practices that make shopping a perpetual necessity. I want to create new images of real people with undeniable presences that trope old stereotypes and static myths. The certainties with which we used to view images of the body have eroded in our recent understandings of the social construction of reality in the cultural production of gender, sexuality, and psychopathology.

This contemporary Venus is not a Goddess in the conventional sense of a contained figure. She is an unruly woman, actively making a spectacle of herself. Queering Botticelli, leaking, projecting, shooting, secreting milk, transgressing the boundaries of her body. Hundreds of years have passed and we are still engaged in a struggle for interpretive power over our bodies in a society where they are marked as a battleground by the church and the state in legal and medical skirmishes.

III. Excessive Eruption, oil on masonite, 20 1/2 X 14 1/4, 1993.

The woman in this painting is quietly exploding fire and hot lava into the environment. She is transforming the world around her and transgressing old stereotypes of African American women.

Subaltern women are erupting from the claims of a unitary body that is hierarchical and orders them at the bottom where the Earth’s plates are shifting and causing fabulous flows of magma never before experienced. Anita Hill erupted onto the American scene with a force that cannot be contained, as did Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Lani Guinere, Octavia Butler, and bell hooks.

IV. Millennial Children, oil on canvas, 58″ X 72″, 1992.

In many medieval manuscripts there are sweet little figures kneeling and burning in hell. This painting of hell, a provisional dystopia, is literal, material and technical. It is a vision of Houston, Texas on fire not unlike the one that occurred in Los angeles several months after I painted this one. The bayou is polluted from local oil refinery or chemical plant and the fish have bellied up. The south Texas nuclear plant is busy producing and the stealth bomber, looking like a Bat plane, approaches, both are viewed by some as saviors, like smart bombs. The oil fields are reminiscent of Kuwait and lightning in the sky adds the displeasure of the gods. The Medieval demon dancing in the middle ground flashes George Bush’s image in its abdomen. Andean Condors, white-collar executives, wait in the scorched
trees to consume the kill. The African hunting dogs, on the left, close the circle that surrounds the girls. Are they stalkers or protectors?

How are these children, young girls, sisters, going to grow up and survive in this world? They have each other, the future, the experience of witnessing this reality and a couple of small dark guardian angels. But is it enough?

V. So? oil on canvas, 36″ X 24″, 1993

So? Meaning, so how am I, this young African American woman, supposed to deal with this history? This reality? Here underground, under the “tree of life” where we don’t know if it is sunrise or sunset. But it is a liminal time between something. The twigs and branches surrounding the figure form vignettes of cultural and historical significance. Going clockwise, there is a lynching by the Klu Klux Klan, a scene of a women bending over in fields of endless manual labor, next a black preacher is shushing her, telling her to let the men go first, this leads to the
vision of brutality to her father, uncles, brother, cousin, lover, or friend by local law enforcement agents. Finally, there is Anita Hill and the pig-headed Judicial Committee.

Past meanings, those born in the dialogue of past centuries can never be stable or finalized once and for all. I believe that there is a palpable need to rehabilitate the images of the mind and body through a process of personal interrogation that interprets the evidence of our own condition, our own time, our own metaphors for our realities, unashamedly.

VI. Cyborg, oil on canvas, 36″ X 28″, 1989

I read Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs” in 1989. “My Cyborg Myth,” she wrote, “is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work. One of my premises is that most American Socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animals and machine, idealism and materialism in social practices, symbolic formulation and physical artifacts associated with ‘high technology’ and scientific culture….But a slightly perverse shift of
perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies.”

This painting is an engagement of Donna Haraway’s myth which has affected much of my work since them. In her essay, she speaks of new cybernetic technologies of perception and operation that breakdown boundaries in ways that make the marginal central. she refers to a new science fiction, new non-essentialist, post enlightenment visions, practices and projects. She believes in an impending paradigm shift, one that produces a styleless style, one that offers new relationships with the self and others that go beyond connections of blood, race, or sex. It is a vision of the self mutating towards otherness; that, like a virus, marks a boundary or limit beyond which reason cannot go. For her, as for other post-modernist feminists the task is how to understand and reconstitute the self, gender, knowledge, social relations, and culture without resorting to linear, teleological, hierarchic, holistic, or binary ways of thinking. The last line of this important essay still strongly resonates: “I’d rather be a cyborg than a Goddess.”

The borderlands between human, animal, and technology, between the cosmos, machines and an earthscape offer rich possibilities. The woman in this painting is Chinese; she can be read as a third world person who is part human, part machine. She is a scientist, an artist, a shaman. The stylized D.I.P. switches of an integrated circuit board on her chest represent the controls and possibilities of connecting with the galaxies which have been generated in the great computer in the sky. In the central panel Einstein’s formula for relativity is written as well as a partial equation seen in chaos theory. A game of tic-tac-toe has been played with the symbols for female and male and
the women have won. The shamanic headdress of the ghost of a white tigress reshapes the contours of the woman’s image to that of the mysterious Great Sphinx whose ancient pyramid companion reminds us of historical accumulations of knowledge. I wanted this painting to embody, through my engagement with her essay, Dona Haraway’s biologic, theoretical and social and political efforts.

VII. La Mestiza Cosmica, oil on canvass, 40″ X 24″, 1992.

The figures in my paintings can all be read as Cyborgs, not in the scientific human/machine form, but in the mystic/metaphoric/theoretical way in which they defy categorization and act as transgressors.

The Virgin of Guadelupe is a virgin who is not represented as a mother. Rather she is related to the Virgin of the Apocalypse who crushes the serpent and is in possession of the heavens, the place from which she protects her chosen people. She is still revered in Mexico today as she is a symbol of rebellion against the rich, upper and Middle class. She unites races and mediates between humans and the divine, the natural and the technological. In my painting a Mestiza stands with foot in Texas and one foot in Mexico. she is taming a diamond-back rattlesnake with one hand and manipulating the Hubble telescope with another. The four hands, two of which are disembodied, echo the Aztec statue of the Great goddess Coatilicue with her necklace of four hands and two hearts.

VIII. Self-Consortium, oil on canvas, 36″ X 24″, 1993.

I think the vantage point expressed in a new kind of techno-surrealism offers us the space to re-map and re-inhabit new narratives for social thought. This vantage point is a confrontation with Tricksters, Curanderas, Cyborgs, Mestizas, Saints and Angels that work to refigure conceptions of human experience, breaking boundaries, de-centering reality and using cybernetic sensorium. Donna Haraway states, “Science fiction is generally concerned with the interpretation of boundaries between problematic selves and unexpected others and with the exploration of possible worlds in a context structured by transnational technoscience.” In this painting, a young woman and her cloned
android or trans-individual move inside and outside inner and outer space with a large serpentine strand of DNA. Like the spider woman who spins her web out of her own body, the clone flaunts her electronic bio-constructedness. The pattern on their dresses suggest a kind of textile wiring that allows them to communicate. The exposed brain with antennas and the hand computer are clues to the clones interactive wiring, whereas the organic sister seems to have the power to juggle galaxies independently. Technology continues to develop exponentially and biological research brings into question just what it means to be human. It is wise to remember all these technologies are part of
ourselves. They shape us and they have no force outside of a system of social practices. As Haraway points out, “Its important to remember that we might have been otherwise and might yet be as a matter of embodied fact.”

IX. A Diffraction, oil on canvas, 58″ X 46″, 1992.
For me the black space in my paintings is a place that existed before and after patriarchy, a place upon which to illuminate new myths and provisional utopias, as well as to gain the distance to see ourselves and be able to change.

A diffraction is the effect that occurs when something interferes with the direct course of light, the difference that occurs, It is not a reflection, a replication, or displacement of the same elsewhere. It is something that makes a difference. It is the visual metaphor that Donna Haraway has been using in her recent work to identify a process for change. The screened memory of a powerful male figure in every women’s life marks a place where change occurs. The shifts that occur with age and psychic transformations, the multiple selves incorporated in one body are embodied in the central figure with its two heads, extra fingers, and metaphysical space in between.

Diffraction occurs at a place at the edge of the future, before the abyss of the unknown. The structural pattern of the matter in a galaxy may be repeated in a magnolia blossom. I’m trying to create bodies that matter.

X. Skywalker Biding Through, oil on canvas, 58″ X 46″, 1994.

The emotionally charged physicality of this figure leaps out of the canvas having escaped from the cultural trappings of the planet earth. She strides through many obstacles, pushing aside any old asteroid that gets in her way. She’s like Wonder Woman or She Ra Princess of power. Her eyes lock onto those of the viewers, reinforcing her power and self-identity, confidently, not passive but wise, self-assured, perhaps even predatory. She is a woman who is unapologetic in urging us to negotiate obstacles and confront the future. The large triangle that slices
across the right side of the space represents another dimension past or future to be negotiated. The globular nebula floating behind her is organic, a human organ or uterus sent out in space.

XI. Somnambulist Mall Walking, oil on canvas, 59″ X 48″, 1995.

The sleepwalker seems to be a cross between a fifty foot tall, bionic woman floating like a dirigible and a suburban woman turned zombie straight out of George Romero’s film Dawn of the Living Dead – a movie where the deceased, having turned to zombies, try to return to the only place of public culture left to them at the end of the Twentieth Century – the shopping mall.

Another way to think about this painting is that the escape to the suburban shopping mall in so-called “secure” communities has prevented many people from understanding the fragile precariousness of our lived daily existence. This painting was completed only a few months prior to the Oklahoma City bombing.

So, while the Explorer goes up to outer space on a romantic, moon-lit evening, children are being exploded out of buildings and the army has hit the streets.

XII. Immeasurable Results, oil on masonite, 9 1/2″ X 10″, 1994.

This painting is almost a replication of a Hitachi advertisement for its Magnetic Resonance Imaging Machine (MRI). However, it records what the machine cannot: fears, desires, subconscious connections to the experience and fantasy. It is important to remember that these very expensive and impressive machines do not measure everything; emotions are not easily digitalized. Attaining knowledge is part of being human, but discovering an aneurism doesn’t mean we understand the mind and the needs of the person who is host to it.

In the illuminated chart of the schematization of the woman’s brain there is a mermaid with an open fish mouth, she is swimming next to a floating penis with testicles. A red demon pounding a hammer on her skull echoes the sound emitted by the machine. An alligator hopefully surveys the scene. A pocket watch with crab claws for hands on the outside and no hands on the inside together with a calavera figure with its spear poised to land a fatal blow attest to the fears and anxiety the patient feels that the test might announce her death.

XIII. The Laboratory, or The Passion of Onco Mouse, oil on masonite, 10″ X 7″, 1994.

Onco mouse is the first patented life form. She contains a transplanted human gene that produces a tumor, an oncogene that reliably causes breast cancer. She is part of the secular salvation history that is constructed by powers that control trans-national techno-science. She is our savior, she was born, lives and dies so that we might live free of breast cancer, and she suffers continuously and profoundly for us – her sisters. For many she is just an ordinary commodity, a tool and just one of the many dial-a-mouse utensils for advancing knowledge. Her natural habitat is the laboratory, the optical chamber the world peers into for advancing its interests.

In my painting a redemptive cyborgian mouse stares back with her human hand tucked under her whiskered chin. She has human arms and legs and small breasts and the rest of her body is mouse – at least on the outside. She bears a crown of thorns signifying her predestined sacrificial life. She sits in an optical chamber, the laboratory, surrounded by pairs of eyes watching and examining her every move. The eyes are not all the same, they come from different locations geographically and by race and gender.

Onco Mouse is one of the potent figures introduced to me in Donna Haraway’s recent work. Work that analyses the implication of mixing genes, our lineages across species for norms of kinship. “Racists take heed,” she cautions.

XIV. Brain Waves, oil on canvas, 30″ X 24″ 1996.

From the “high technological” apparatuses in intensive care units we’ve learned to reduce life to brain waves. Keeping a person alive is centered on scanning the electrical charges emitted from the brain. The continuance of “personhood” becomes totally dependent on brain function, increasingly other organs can be replaced. The brain uses the outside world to shape itself through our sensory organs and mental perceptions. Our brains connect to other brains.

In my painting an Octopus, a creature who historically represents regeneration and rebirth, due to its ability to regenerate its tentacles, is integrated into the “cowgirl’s” brain. The fleshy quality and sensuous shape of the octopus echo the face and contours of the woman. The tentacles reach outside the hat and connect with the blood vessels in the X-Ray whose purpose is to make the brain visible. The magnetic connection between the moon and the ocean might be similar to the connection between our consciousness and subconscious and unconscious. The schizophrenic who said, “My brain is broken, it just doesn’t work right” may represent a symptom of a society that is resistant to making far reaching connections to multiple networks.

There is an ominous quality in the cowgirl’s eyes reminiscent of some of our feelings about the Octopus’ ability to ensnare its prey in the dark corners, nooks, and crannies of the ocean floor by wrapping its tentacles around you and ingesting you. Not unlike the seductions of television.

XV. Transfusions, oil on canvas, 48″ X 59″, 1995.

The cartoon-like figure working in the teleo operating machine is the actor Max Schreck as he was costumed in the 1928 film Nosferatu: The Vampire, directed by F.W. Murnau. His bulging eyes stare downward through a magnifying glass to his claw-like hands which maneuver the remote controls that seem to set the dancing vampire bats into the spirals and swirls of a strange mating ritual in the dark – a non-phallic fusion. the woman dancer, who is lying on a gurney in outer-space, is like the Vampire undead, in a deep coma or an altered state of being. Her arched back and pelvis do not recoil from the transfusions that are occurring, instead they appear pleasing. A familiar medical
stand and blood bag which slowly drips its potent fluid into the ambiguous kinship exchange below exemplifies the recent transgressive trafficking across gender, race, species, and machines of vital substances. Whose blood infuses the veins of the Vampire Bat? What changes will occur?

This painting came out of a direct engagement with Donna Haraway’s essay, “Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture. Its All in the Family: Biological kinship categories in the 20th Century United States.” The practices which bind the global family together are no metaphoric flights of fantasy. “They are fiercely material and irreducibly imaginary,” she writes. They are the “world destroyer” and “world building processes of technoscience.”

XVI. The Annunciation of the Second Coming, oil on canvas, 58″ X 64″, 1996.

Unlike the annunciation angels who serenely announce the birth of Christ this angel is issuing a warning: life as we’ve known it is changing. The landscape in the background seems familiar and stable yet there is a fantasy quality that is ethereal. The ethers of another region have escaped like the large strand of DNA on the right. The angel is rendered like a Renaissance figure except for her transparent wings. She gestures toward the electrically constructed Galatea, a goddess who is off her pedestal and out of the control of her creator-pygmalion. They move through a sort of 15th century colonnade whose pathway is the interior of a computer. The “Wired” goddess seems to have amphibian feet and her dark and shapely body remind one of a wet-suit. The slight stiffness and actual shape relate to Greek and Roman statues. But the digitalized surface of her body and the electric blue outline along with her clear stride into the future makes us aware of the collision of social fabrics of different eras. She is a strangely androgynous, hyper-contemporary and
reassembled character. These two figures – bodies without organs, are the kind of sexually liberated phantoms that illuminate the night. The danger of the dreams and fantasies of technological transcendence of the body, is to love that which cannot and does not exist, to engage in a desire for unrequited love for the life extenders beyond the limits of the possible and to become a technophiliac. Nevertheless, the idea of a new technologically enhanced well-being and independence is possible and already occurring in many ways, but we are warned by a techno-angel. Beware! Still, “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”

Post-Conventional Thinking

We all have a screen in our heads. We project our dreams on to it and we repress a significant amount of the images and narratives we construct. I use the screen in my head mostly in semi-conscious states, before I go to sleep or in the early, quiet hours of the morning. I run images across it, the images are paintings in progress. They are of people I know, the things I’ve been visually enchanted by, as well as ones I’ve imagined. these are attached to my values and desires as well as what I’ve been thinking and reading and watching across the cultural plane. One thing will connect to another until I can start to materially produce them.

Occasionally I am jolted by a complete vision which I always follow directly into a painting. While I’m painting, new images occur. the whole thing is never predetermined but worked through to a point where I can abandon it.

I see the world as having an underlying web of connections and my brain screens out the larger world while it crosses the boundaries of time and space to form the pathways that connect one network to another. It is an attempt to reach across paradigms to a different expression of reality, one that will create new myths and constructions. I have been using particular people, places, and things, going from the specific materialsubject to the metaphysical-ontological in a way that allows the content or meaning to bind itself to the particular objects as they form connections to each other and the structure or composition in a way that makes meaning visible. The paintings are “hypertexts” – interactively readable; not finally fact or statement, but metaphors for a provisional reality that I hope will connect to the realities of others.

In some of her recent work, Dona Haraway speaks about hypertexts. The “computer software for organizing networks of conceptual links.” Hypertexts,” she notes, “both represents and forges webs of relationships.” “It actively produces consciousness of the objects it constitutes. It allows one to craft and follow many bushes of connections among the variables internal to a category.” “Helping users hold things in material, symbolic and psychic connection.” “Perhaps, most important, hypertext delineates possible paths of action in a world for which it serves simultaneously as tool and metaphor.”

I think that the kind of post conventional thinking that produces Hypertext might be an adaptation of the mind to the everyday world of the late 20th Century, with its massive confusions and challenges in an environment of uncertainty, loss of confidence in many institutions, and seemingly endless choices.

Clearly for me the charged connection and dynamic interaction with Donna Haraway has been intellectually stimulating, creatively provocative and enormously pleasuring. We, like many others, are trying to get between the electrons and protons of binary thinking and cause friction and attraction and produce newly charged metaphors that provoke a more socially responsible way of being here and now, but someplace else.