Artist Curator Writer
Barred Owl
All summer long a barred owl hooted outside,
keeping me company during the sleepless times.
Friday morning I found him on Chicopee Row, recently hit.
As I gathered him up,
he opened his eyes one last time,
seeing me.
Later that afternoon-
I took him to his final resting place
on a hill where 3 oak trees grow
together as one.
The silent nights are lonely without his call.
Deborah Santoro
I had the pleasure and honor of auditing a printmaking seminar with Phyllis McGibbon at my alma mater last fall. This allowed me to try lithography for the first time, and to substantially improve my silk screening technique. More importantly, my ideas and thinking evolved and the LIQUORS & Chakras series took a huge leap.
While I was writing a reflection paper for the class, my husband came up with the idea to put them all together in one image. The resulting image (above) shows the original 70s era LIQUORS sign in Ayer, Massachusetts, alongside an early gelatin print version of the sign that is about 7 feet tall. Figure 3 is a hanging mobile made of paper and transparent film, shown here before) and finally the black, white & silver prints in image 4 are my final project for the class, a series of 7 silkscreen prints.
It all started with a 60s era LIQUORS sign in Ayer, Ma. For several years I have been weaving the letters (LIQUORS) in and out of yoga poses and tile patterns in my prints and multimedia pieces. In March I made my first gelatin printed LIQUORS sign, 8 feet tall and 14 inches wide. And then I made another. It was interesting that just as I was committing to make prints that I could sell, the first things I actually made were more or less unsaleable prints.
The 7 letters of the LIQUORS sign line up neatly with the 7 chakras, an esoteric system of thinking about the energetic body that emerged in India centuries ago and was imported to the West along with yoga in the 19th century. The chakras and their associated colors, meanings, and locations continue to evolve in the West.
Chakras are thought to be spinning orbs of energy at various locations in the body. This concept is useful to yoga practitioners who use them as focal points, a means of concentrating ones mind on the practice.
The LIQUORS sign points to the ubiquity of alcohol in our culture. Despite the fact that a percentage of the population is always in recovery, our culture values the convenience having alcohol in grocery stores. Imagine for a moment that you are recovering from opioid or alcohol addiction, and yet simply to purchase bread, milk, and eggs, you are obliged to walk past an aisle full of beer and wine. For most people in recovery, it’s not just one substance, it’s any mind altering substance they can’t have, because one is never enough.
This is the mock up of the sign. The final version will be fashioned of silkscreen on acetate, laser cut plexiglass, marbled and hand printed papers. Inside the letters are allusions to places in the body the chakras represent and potential pathways for healing. There are x-rays, neurons, words, brain imagery, yoga poses, heroin molecules, and more. The imagery here is evolving as I study the chakras and learn how to heal from grief. A good friend told me that I would have to learn how to incorporate this loss into a new version of myself. The one thing that’s missing in this sign is my sister- I’m still figuring out how to add her in.
Here it is in my studio, twirling:
This piece iterates an ongoing exploration of the hip joint, the space in and around where the head of the femur sits in the socket of the pelvis known as the acetabulum. The yogi reaches through time when she reaches for a deep bind, exploring layers of tension in the body. The pose here is pasasana, or noose pose, and is the first pose of the 2nd series of Ashtanga yoga.
I’m participating in an Artist 2 Work incubator program designed by Professor Ellen Wetmore of UMASS Lowell. So far we’ve had lectures from professors on value proposition, basic marketing concepts tailored specifically for artists and the art market, branding, and targeting the luxury market. I’ve learned many new things and relearned things I’ve forgotten that I knew.
Our first homework assignment was to write a value proposition. She asked for 2 sentences and I wrote a paragraph. Typical. Separately from the class I read advice on applying for grants that seemed sound- have 3 people review your grant proposal before you submit it, and include at least one person who does not speak the lingo. The rationale is that not everyone on the board of folks reviewing your grant will be fluent in art speak, and you need to reach them too. So I had my husband read my value proposition, and at first I though he just didn’t get it, but by the next morning I realized that I just wasn’t being very clear.
Good advice, that.
My prints and multi-media pieces inhabit the space between yearning and falling, between striving to realize a potential, and the habits/patterns/programs that enmesh us in ways of being that do not serve our higher selves. The LIQUORS sign becomes a stand-in for addictions of all kinds, and the hopelessness that trails them. The asana, or yoga poses, represent an embodied, intuitive knowing that links human potential with universal themes; dendrites and star charts, our mitochondria like tiny suns inside our bodies. In the time bound dance between despair and enlightenment, time, pattern and color all have their part to play.
I recently went to Wellesley to see the Kathe Kollwitz/ Krieg Cycle exhibit at the Davis Museum & Cultural Center. I’d write about that, but Altoon Sultan already did that here. While I was in the vicinity, I went to Altoon’s current exhibit at the David Hall Fine Arts Gallery downtown. I went with children, and so didn’t have quite as much time to really look as I would have liked. It’s a bit distracting when your middle daughter starts rolling around the gallery on a wheeled chair, even if the owner is exceedingly nice and even encouraging.
Still, I have admired her from afar for some time and it was wonderful to see these exquisite little works in person.
I was also given a large full color catalog with a full length essay about her work, which I will read as soon as I remember where I put it. It was been that kind of week. Two weeks, really. But today I’m back in the studio and it’s been so long since I updated my website/blog, that I’m feeling slightly ashamed.
Not for lack of working, however. Here is a new piece:
It’s similar to what I’m working on today, only now it’s a diptych, with more orange. An interesting confluence, to me at least, is that the way Altoon’s hooked wool rectangles hang from pins on the gallery wall causes them to be not perfectly straight. The gelatin plates I’m using are the same way, and as they age they become more and more irregular. All in the interest of subverting the tyranny of the rectangle.
The diptych idea popped into my head about a month ago, but it requires a bit of a set-up to line everything up, which I finally did today.
One more thing. I’ve become hooked on listening to the Modern Art Notes Podcasts while I work. They had a really interesting one on Picasso’s sculpture at the MoMA, and today I listened to an older one on Marylin Minter and David Ireland. If you like modern and contemporary art, they are a great way to learn while you work.
