Current Show - MAY 2003

Dead Reckoning
by Judy Blanco

Opening reception: March 1, 6-10pm
Ladyfest reception: March 27, 6-10pm
Show dates: March 2-31, 2003
Gallery hours: Thursday- Sunday 12-4pm

The conceptual departure point for this show is the navigational method "Dead Reckoning". Pre-dating celestial navigation, DR allows a navigator (in sea or sky) to estimate future positions by projecting a course steered and applying speed from a present known or estimated position. It allows the navigator to estimate where they will be at a certain time if they hold the speed, time, and course they are presently traveling. The DR method is only an estimation because it cannot take into account the action of wind, current, or pilot/helmsman error. With the introduction of the magnetic compass to Europe by the Chinese, DR has been used since at least 1183. It is still used as a failsafe for today's high-tech navigational systems.

This body of work represents a journey that began in the summer of 2001 when I made a strangely prophetic series of large paintings and drawings depicting plane crashes over water. I was very compelled by this subject matter personally but also formally. The challenge of painting from my imagination in such a narrative and representational way was thrilling, right up until September 11th. After that, the quest became how to continue to consider these things with the possibility of realism annihilated. My solution was to draw myself out of this corner, which evolved into the imagery you see in this show. The directness of the imagery and the diagrammatic aspect of this work demand the exploration of the intersection of the personal, metaphysical, and political.

Like Dead Reckoning, my drawings and prints operate as instruments of estimation. The show groups three projects that use antiquated mediums (pencil drawing, etching, cyanotype). I like the lo-tech, manual aspect of these methods. The technical aspects of printmaking demands patience and practice in order to get interesting results. The variables that contribute to the finished image are many: the balance of chemicals, the timing of aquatint, the texture of ink, the pressure of the press, the wetness of the paper, the strength of the light, the temperature of the water, the list goes on and on. However, attending to the variables allows only so much control; and often when I think I have done everything with technical perfection, the print or plate will be a surprising disaster. The resulting image is only ever my best estimation of what I need to do to reach my destination. It changes slightly each time I make something new.

My imagery is preoccupied with bringing a cyclical mechanism into view, with capturing readings, or, perhaps better, snapshots of arrested motion where, like in the heavenly motions, all movements are perfect, and where their beginning and end are invisible, like our mortality. The images are preoccupied with the passage of time and its apprehension, noticed easily in aspects like the setting sun, but also more imperceptibly, like the earth rotating.

The "Toleta" prints resemble flight instrument panel gauges, stars, targets, crosshairs. (The original Toleta was a simple charting mechanism used in early sea navigation to plot the distance traveled in a specified time) My images form, via simple diagrammatic marks, estimations of time, place, location, position, and state, that are frozen with the image. They hold in stasis an ephemeral moment, like when you try to grasp the shape and pattern of a snowflake in the milliseconds before it melts, disappearing in your palm. They offer a reading of an intangible piece of data. Like the prestidigitator's sleight of hand, they are there, but at the same time not. While the images seem reminiscent of other symbols or configurations, they function like a fragment of memory or a piece of a dream. The narrative they offer is not one of complete sentences, rather they suggest the enigma signified by the ellipsis. The x/y axis formation in the prints is repeated but the meaning (one's sense of narrative) shifts slightly with each one.

The "Runway" drawings explore a similar reference to the flight panel instrument but more expansively by employing a quaternary structure. The pervasiveness of this symbol is widespread even among diverse cultures and through time and has been used to describe what we like to call essentials: the four elements, the four seasons, the four directions, to name only a few. The influence of looking at 19th century hand-drafted engineering drawings led me to adapt their symbolism to the "Runway" drawings with the added trick that I do not include a key for what the marks in the quadrants might be said to represent. They are simple estimations, and cannot take into account the interpretation by the viewer of what they may call up.

The "Invaginated Lighthouse" series also employs a bogus drafting method to make, literally, a "blue print", i.e. a "ground plan" for an implausible and useless structure. The series pictures a lighthouse that instead of taking the shape of a skinny tower built up into the air, becomes a wide, deeply spiraling structure that is submerged in the sea. Not only is a lighthouse built down into the sea useless as a structure to prevent ships from running aground, but my ironic plans for the lighthouse hinge on it's uselessness on the mainland, and instead propose the beacon for another kind of world.