glass glas

glass glas...completed in August 2012. 49" wide x 23" high and 7/8" deep (approximately 125cm x 58cm x 2cm), screenprinting and drawing on birch panels and steel. The two outside panels are thin steel bonded to the wood panels; the central square panel is wood. The three panels are worked on separately, then fastened together as one piece. Again, this work deals with ideas contained in previous work pertaining to boundary language, idiotic symmetry, memory, private and public narrative, private and public space, time, light...the list seems to keep growing! The wing panels are derived from photographs taken in a hotel room in Lisdoonvarna, Co. Clare, Ireland, in May of 2011, while the central panel is from a photo of a slough somewhere in southern Saskatchewan, Canada, taken two years earlier. Although these began originally as photographic images with no particular purpose, they eventually find some connection through my meanderings. The photographs then supply a structure on which the image and its meanings are built - the 'construction' lines are easily visible in the central panel (and they also may obliquely reference the system of land surveying used in Canada which divides the country into square miles known as sections). The screenprinting stencils are created by printing (on an inkjet printer) the original photograph (in black ink) in sections that fit onto 8.5" x 11" transparencies. These transparencies are then spliced together to generate the 'big' transparency that will be used to make the screenprint stencil (the wing panels each involve six transparencies spliced together, the central panel has twelve). It is puzzling but also interesting that the computer will 'interpret' information in such a way so as to produce the optimum image through its choices, rather than mine, meaning that the individual transparencies, although originally derived from the same photo using the same printing preferences, end up being visually different from each other as statements about light and space, relative to what the camera - or I, for that matter - recorded, hence the accidental construction grid.
Lisdoonvarna is famous for its matchmaking festival in the fall, which involves a great deal of dancing, apparently, so this piece had a working title of dance dance. Within the central panel, if the viewer looks closely, can be read the scraffito text of some Joni Mitchell (Alberta born and Saskatchewan raised) lyrics from her song 'All I Want' on her stunningly beautiful album 'Blue', which was released when I had just turned twenty, a long time ago...what I wanted then is still all I want. But the working title seemed both obvious and obtuse, and I preferred something that was less obvious and possibly more obtuse. There was a toss-up eventually between clare claire and glass glas, the first playing on words describing space (as in County Clare) and light (as in clear/claire), the second on materials of transparency (glass) and reflection (glas, Irish 'green', Welsh 'blue', Scottish 'water', amongst other meanings in other languages). There is, of course, a great deal else not being said at all...