Patterns
serigraphy screens, prints on paper
2015
This series of serigraphy screens were produced according to the same procedure. A section of a drawing was retraced from a document by another author, and then used to create a pattern. The authors whose works I thus cited form a constellation of figures that all have a link to traveling and exploration in the modern era, specifically in relation to the Amazon bassin. These works were inspired by the research I have been doing in relation to a work that is currently in progress, in relation to the Pirahã tribe in Brazil, and the research on their culture and language by the anthropologist Marco Antonio Gonçalves.
The figures whose works I cited in this series are the following:
Guido Boggiani (1861-1902) an Italian artist who traveled to South America at the end of the 19th century and documented the complex body and facial designs of the Caduveo people.
Claude-Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) a French anthropologist and Darcy Ribeiro (1922-1997) a Brazilian anthropologist, both of whom also documented and wrote about the Caduveo in the 1930’s and 1940’s respectively.
Hercules Florence (1804-1879) a French artist and inventor who initially came to Brazil to accompany a scientific expedition as one of its illustrators. He went on to stay in Brazil and to invent both a transcription for the bird and animal sounds he encoutered in the Amazon which he called “zoophonia.” He is also credited with inventing a method of photography in 1832, at the same time as Thomas Wedgewood, albeit with more technical success. The latter discovery, which he named “photographia,” passed by unnoticed, in part because of his distance from Europe.
John Ruskin (1819-1900) a British writer and art critic. The image I used is an illustration Ruskin made for a book he designed entirely by hand (tracing the letters to ressemble printed type) at the age of 7. Though Ruskin seems disconnected from the other figures, a similar impulse of discovery and rediscovery, tinged and informed by the 19th century Romanticism, marks both his writings as well as those of the other figures named above.
Like points in a constellation, the threads that link these figures together are discrete and often tangential in nature. As with all of my other serigraphy or silkscreen works, the work in each case is the individual screen and the right to print with it. Neither the prints nor the design can become the object of a commercial exchange.
Installation at Zitat gallery in Rome:
Installation at the Guggenheim Museum, New York:
Installation at the Galerie Georges-Philippe et Natalie Vallois in Paris:
