Recent Projects > The Last Color: A Reliquary

Asemic Prayer #3
New York Time plastic delivery wrapping
variable
2017
Blue Rose (After the North Rose at Chartres Cathedral)
de-acidified New York Times newspaper, matte medium, UV varnish, nails, magnets
22"x24"
2017
Blue Rose (After the North Rose at Chartres Cathedral)
de-acidified New York Times newspaper, matte medium, UV varnish, nails, magnets
22"x24"
2017
Detail of Blue Rose (After the North Rose at Chartres Cathedral)
de-acidified New York Times newspaper, matte medium, UV varnish, nails, magnets
22"x24"
2017
A Reliquary
New York Time plastic delivery wrapping, carved gypsum, ink transfer, ink
variable
2017
A Reliquary
New York Time plastic delivery wrapping, carved gypsum, ink transfer, ink
variable
2017
A Reliquary
New York Time plastic delivery wrapping, carved gypsum, ink transfer, ink
variable
2017
A Reliquary
New York Time plastic delivery wrapping, carved gypsum, ink transfer, ink
variable
2017
Asemic Tablets
carved gypsum, ink transfer, ink
variable
2017
Asemic Tablets
carved gypsum, ink transfer, ink
variable
2017
Fold Key #1
ink on watercolor paper
12x9 IN
2017
Fold Key #2
ink on watercolor paper
12x9 IN
2017
Asemic Prayer Study #4
acrylic gouache on watercolor paper
9x12 IN
2017
Asemic Prayer Study #4
acrylic gouache on watercolor paper
9x12 IN
2017
Asemic Prayer Study #1
acrylic gouache on watercolor paper
12x9 IN
2017
Asemic Prayer Study #2
acrylic gouache on watercolor paper
9x12 IN
2017
Framed
2017

For the past few years, I have used the New York Times newspaper as a vehicle for examining the media’s global influence and how it shapes and maintains our collective and individual belief systems. A long-term struggle with illness sensitized me to the tension between the presentation of unbiased facts and personal experience. For me, The New York Times has become a referent for “objective truth” and a source material for my collages, printmaking, and wall reliefs. By excising the text and images from journalistic sections and advertisements, I make space for what has been relegated to the margins, censored and lost in the translation of experience into language.

The Last Color: A Reliquary is multi-disciplinary act of redaction and reification of meaning; removing the newspaper completely, I leave behind its fragile blue casing. I have imagined a post-apocalyptic collapse of language and rediscovery of communion through a transformative engagement with the plastic sleeves that once protected daily news articles and opinions from the elements. “The Last Color: A Reliquary” is comprised of several Asemic Prayers*: fused textiles made from New York Times delivery wrapping, gouache and ink studies, broken tablets bearing my textile fold vocabulary sometimes carved into images of graffiti, a lone newspaper cut and a performative reading. In this work, the formal conventions of mass media collide with the more metaphysical aspects of knowing and believing: hands-on craft, repetition, beauty and ritual.

*Asemia is a condition where one can no longer understand or express any signs or symbols.