The Last Color: A Reliquary
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.