Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

My paper, about two paintings in the pop-up exhibition from a series called “Black and White World,” concerns the visual construction of meaning during a period of multiple crises: the global pandemic of course, but also the culminating year of the Trump administration and the social polarization and conflict it precipitated and intensified. In states of crisis, thinking tends toward the existential and reductive. This is a primal response perhaps, but also one amplified by our technologically sophisticated, digitally networked reality—in social, news, and other media. My paintings reflect on this rather desperate state of affairs, which persists to the present day. Emphatically three-dimensional, and viewable from both sides when hung from the ceiling, the paintings are of Plates 1 and 4 from the original set of 10 ink blots published by Hermann Rorschach in 1921. The blots were used originally to elicit visual associations from patients that might reveal something about the “deeper” state of their psychology. By reversing the figure of the blot on the white recto, and black verso, these images draw attention not just to human subjectivity and the act of constructing meaning, but also to ways this activity can be constrained and diminished—in this case within two (geometrically identical) figure-ground relationships: one white-on-black, the other black-on-white. Like our current cultural moment perhaps, there may be interpretive choices available here, but they are stark, with little nuance or complications, no colors—not even any grey areas.