Displacement and disappearance

when paintings
become
cities.

"Humphries’s lightbox paintings are made with fluorescent paint on translucent fabric,
set within a lightbox, and lit with a black light—sneering X-ray abstractions.
These and her paintings on canvas lit by black lights coolly
conjure the nocturnal energy of a sweaty danceclub."

Jacqueline Humphries

Jacqueline Humphries


Clockwork Lemon, 2005,
oil and enamel on linen

Cecily Bown: Disruption is an important part in thinking about the works you did in New Orleans for the Prospect.1 Biennial. You had regular three-dimensional paintings hung on the walls alongside paintings that were spray painted directly onto the walls. This must have given viewers a sense of dislocation. At a glance it looked like a room full of paintings, but as you got closer you realized some were not there in the same way. You managed to express your way of thinking about painting as a type of trace. The pieces that were directly on the walls were like shadows or ghosts of paintings.

Jacqueline Humphries: There’s a play between the paintings and the non-paintings. I wanted to see if real paintings would behave differently in this space, an auto garage, than if they were simply in a white space with other paintings. I left a trace to point to an absence with the wall paintings. So there’s something there as a way of saying there’s nothing there. It’s almost like the hyperpresence is the paintings themselves, the presence is the room itself, and the absence is those black paintings on the wall that give the sense of the reality of the environment having vanished.

Cecily Brown: Exactly what happened in New Orleans—

Jacqueline Humphries: Displacement and disappearance. Architecture, of course, is a very important register of the events that occurred. You go there and see how the architecture has been affected, and you think, These were homes, lives happened here. I wanted that context, which is why I chose a space with all the texture and ambiance of New Orleans; it’s decayed, its paint is peeling, it’s old, it’s dirty, it’s soggy, and baked. It’s all those adjectives that characterize the look and feel of the city, before the hurricane and after.

untitled, 2005..

all text taken from BOMB magazine.
go here to read the full interview...
this posting was inspired by two coats of paint.
go to that blog here!



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