Working Backward

After a three-year residency at Studios, Inc. each artist is given the opportunity to mount a solo exhibition in the 4500 sq ft exhibition hall. It is a thrilling and daunting challenge.

I began thinking about how I would envision the space, and what I was going to address in my work at least a year before the exhibition was to open in January 2021. I made a scale model of the exhibition hall and began to live with it in my studio over the months. I gathered research into artists whose work I admired and began to think about ways in which their work influenced my thinking, among them, the ceramist, Edmund de Waal and the painter, Sam Gilliam. I gathered parts of objects, partial projects, miscellaneous drawings and ideas that had accumulated in my studio and in my head over the time that I had been in my generous studio, pulling things together and seeking synergy and a cohesive direction. By early spring of 2020 I had a plan against which I was ready to execute. Or so I thought.

And then things fell apart. The pandemic arrived along with massive unemployment, the death of George Floyd and the ensuing demonstrations and protests across the country. Schools closed, homelessness and evictions skyrocketed and unparalleled death and disease overtook the nation and the world. On top of it all, the most venomous political environment in decades leading up to the November elections wracked the country. Did I mention climate change? Forest fires sweeping the land, floods and droughts, freezing weather and vast power outages.

How could I execute against what I had envisioned to be a somewhat understandable plan regarding my work in this significant exhibition in the midst of all of this mayhem? All of this trauma? All of the civil and personal upheaval stemming from this marinade of angst, fear and anger that characterized seemingly every day of 2020. Waking up in the morning thinking, I can’t believe we’re in this state. In the middle of the night awakening to the idea that, this is America? This is how our democracy works, or doesn’t? Going to bed every night with a kind of weight embedded in my body.

I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say that almost everyone, if not everyone, in the country experienced 2020 in some manner similar to what I described above.

Throughout the year I was still able to work alone in my spacious studio. But I felt rather paralyzed trying to figure out what to do. I ordered the blackest matte black acrylic paint from an art store in England that makes it available to anyone who is not Anish Kapoor. I am not Anish Kapoor, so I got several bottles. I pulled out my Sumi Ink and graphite and charcoal and walnut ink, most of the darkest media I could work with, and they became the tools I used to try to make sense of the world of 2020.

I came to understand that working with so much black, so much darkness was a way of pushing back against the cacophony of the world. In much the same way that black absorbs the light, my interest in working with such dark media was an effort to absorb and subsume the trauma, the angst, the terrible cultural and emotional noise that permeated the days. It was a way in which I could take all of this in and condense it, distill it, control it so that I could keep from drowning in worry and concern. I planned from the beginning to include a long thin gold thorn piece, but it wasn’t until the last few weeks that I realized that this piece would be called The Hope Line. I understood the critical place of hope in the midst of this terrible time.

In a similar way, Meditation Field evolved. On the model I had conceived of a large wall drawing and I created a version on my studio wall. It wasn’t until I installed the piece in the exhibition hall that I understood it as a field of meditation, a place of quiet thoughtfulness, in contrast to the tumult embodied by the American flag at the other end of the room.

As I originally conceived of the exhibition, I had not planned to install the American flag. It was slated to be shown in Chicago in the fall of 2020. That opportunity was canceled as the pandemic progressed. As late as the fall I still hadn’t determined to show the flag as part of this exhibition because it carried so much weight, I wasn’t sure how it would incorporate into the whole.

It soon became apparent there was no choice.
The increasingly dangerous and turbulent times demanded that this work, Flag V, be shown.

It was only after the exhibition was finally installed that I came to understand that all of these works together are a response to the time that we have been living through. They represent an effort to come to grips with where we have been and to consider where we are going.

Thus, the title, The Untangling.

Susan White.
2021