Garden of the Sleeping Giants

Basement Language

Examining More Than One Truth (Hypertufa II)

My artwork is made from garbage, the waste of consumption (including my own) and scrounged detritus from a carelessly littered landscape. Oddly, it is a collective portrait that exudes a sense of abandonment and loss. To further strain the edges of the gorgeous and the absurd, these paintings won’t survive unless kept indoors, hanging on a wall or put into storage bins. With a sidelong glance, I was looking at paintings that began with a question: What is sacred? and sensing them as mere precious objects.

After an exhibit of my paintings—and in general—I am asked (first) if I’ve sold anything. After I mention that I’m pursuing an MFAIA, I am asked (first) what it will be used for. Those moments clobber me, everything stops. And a space opens up:


What is Enough???


Hypertufa is an artificial stone material that is made of several different aggregates (I used peat moss + perlite) and mixed with Portland cement. It is much lighter than cement but can still withstand harsh weather conditions.

Imagine having the sense that you came here to say something, only to find it has slipped your mind > > >


Tufa, also called travertine or dripstone, is calcium carbonate, CaCO3, formed
* in stalactites, stalagmites, and other deposits in limestone caves,
* as incrustations around mouths of hot and cold calcareous springs
* along streams carrying large amounts of calcium carbonate in solution

Hypertufa has been around in Europe in various forms since the early 1800’s. It originated as a replacement for tufa sinks and troughs, which where expensive and difficult to find.

Portrait_Unknown

Parcels of Air

Inhibition of Return

Reluctantly, They Began To Dream of What They Wanted

Of The Ocean

Of The Ocean

begin- a shallow

teardrop

sinks filling

the tongue

This diptych of paintings is an experiment for crossing the boundaries of my poetry and visual art.

click for more detail, working on improving the top image

V-Project

(The concept behind the 5 paintings below)

V-Project: I am making an effort to reclaim the lost territory of connection and continuity in the chronology of historical discourse. The components I created are unsentimental symbols of vaginas—not meant to be essentialist or reductive, but imaging a part of the body hidden, yet not sealed off from the external world; they are passageways—not fixed points—connecting the inside with the outside, binding one being to another in complicated ways. They are portraits, memoir, autobiography, documentary, fictions.

Systems are an overt and underlying theme in my recent work: the grid, repetition, units, layers, time; concepts of closed systems where nothing can get in or out and open systems where there is permeability. Patterns: of society, politics, aesthetics, science, disciplines, people. “How do you anticipate a future you haven’t experienced?” was a question that arose from trying to understand the multiple systems converging into the current economic crisis and the people affected; with the abstraction of statistics, we don’t comprehend the meaning of the data, the context, the realities of the actual people represented by numbers, formulas, and equations. This study segued into my “vagina” project— gender based crimes of war and domestic violence.

What Were They Like?

It Was Reported Their Singing Resembled the Flight of Moths in Moonlight

Titled from a line in the poem What Were They Like? by Denise Levertov

For All I Know, This Happens Every Night

A Memory I Recognize, As Though We Had Been Children Together

Titled from a line in the poem The Pond by Louise Gluck

Evidence That An Event Has Occurred

Matrimonial Tallis: Never Greet Your Husband at the Door In Your Housedress and Rollers

Orpheus: "You're Tougher Than I Thought"

Starting from the top left, the tags read: 

STORM / WHITE

MOSS / WHITE

CLAY / WHITE

FLINT / WHITE

BLACK / WHITE

Eurydice: "I Am an Instrument in the Shape of a Woman"

37 Main Street  Narrowsburg, New York 12764

LISA STRIER

“ART OBJECTS”

MIXED MEDIUMS

 

FEBRUARY 21 – MARCH 14

OPENING RECEPTION

SATURDAY 2.21.09

 

2-4pm

http://www.artsalliancesite.org/programs/gallery.html

Homewrecker

The Edge of One of Many Circles

Title excerpted from Wallace Steven's poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Has Your Husband Come Home To The Right Woman?

Silence, Exile and Cunning

The Sweet Hell Within, The Unknown Want

 

Title excerpted from Walt Whitman's poem — Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking

A Small Part of the Pantomime

Title excerpted from Wallace Stevens's poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

From The Remembrance, The Desire

This painting inspired by:

Long night: unable to sleep

The moonlight, how breakingly bright.

Callling, someone seems calling.

Into the empty air, I answer “Yes?”

—Anonymous (#4 of the Zi Yi series), translated by Wai-Lim Yip

The Joyous Is The Lake. The Clinging Is Fire.

Full Title:

The Joyous Is The Lake. It Means Dropping Off and Bursting Open. Among Women it Means the Tongue and the Mouth. The Clinging Is Fire. It Means Helmets and Weapons. Among Men it Means the Big Bellied.

SOLD

We Can Get Behind

Of The Ocean

Arresting Spring—

Click on image for a larger view

Oh,

In Order to Seduce, the Gods Were Known to Take On Shapes Irresistible to Mere Mortals

SOLD

Any Woman Knows What to Expect When She Gives Him the Best...

MFA-Interdisciplinary Arts

I've been accepted to Goddard College, Plainfield Vermont to pursue my MFA-IA!

I haven't been a college student in 25 years-yikes!

Lying is Done With Words. And Also Silence.

Safe Haven of Pike County Poster

ART-Thentic: Art Auction for Safe Haven of Pike County

July 12th at the  Emerson House, Milford PA 

Call 570.296.2827 for details