TJAMES

Introduction to Selected Work by Terrell James

20th Anniversary Issue of Gulf Coast (30 January 2000):

The artists I have selected for this issue of Gulf Coast are engaged in the transformative activity in art. Process drives discovery. Image is evoked rather than described. The viewer is offered a direct experience of subjectivity, finding an emphasis on the openness of interpretation, and beyond, exploring alternative empathetic relationships. In exploring subjectivity, memory, time, mapping, the body, and text merge as research. Implied is the invitation to "completion" by the viewer.

In Walter Hopps's light drawings, apparent accident and incidental mark create an inevitable form. The delicate tracings that result literally are drawn with light on photographic paper, as particular and unrepeatable as the immediate gesture that caused it, recording time and the body's movement. We may name images: twig, cell, cloud; but these things are felt, intuited, not represented. The light drawings are contained in a slender box Hopps constructed (see image checklist page for detail) from discarded television cue cards, found in an alley in Los Angeles, around 1955. Words once making full sentences are truncated, invoking interpretation, suggesting narrative; but again, hold back objective or known meaning. We are thwarted in our effort to read the text, but still we try to invent the narrative.

Virgil Grotfeldt's works often involve accident, careful drawing, and preexistent text elements. In the Healing Plants series, Grotfeldt manipulates coal dust on top of ledger sheets from another time. Plants are used in healing; early pieces in the series look toward specific botanical studies. Images are isolated on the page, first as the whole plant, then by its parts: seeds, roots, petals, fruit. Later ones, such as the one included here, become looser in form, less scientific in their reference. The Drawings for the Twenty-first Century and Those Who Cannot See are manipulations of coal dust on Braille text. The sighted can see or "read" the image, but not the Braille text. The blind can "read" the preexisting messages in Braille but not the forms on top. Then the works are exhibited with glass on top, or in reproduction, flattened by the mere fact of photographic reproduction; Grotfeldt says "Now the blind cannot read it." The second part of the title, Those Who Cannot See," refers to all of us, not only the blind. Virgil says, "Who knows what it is? What it means? It's more of a feeling than an understanding."

Next we see details from Abdel Hernandez and Fernando Calzdilla's installation The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography.
The piece is an environmental recreation of the every day life of Venezuela, evoking imaginary people and activity in the market place. The installation crosses genres of theater and art, dealing aesthetically with ethnography. Here visual art becomes process, a lab and workshop.

From room to room within the walls of the installation, objects are transformed as the spectator moves between a stage set and memory. Plastic envelops, veils, traps the objects assembled. Transparency exists in daylight; opacity, at night, as artificial light reflects and shields objects behind plastic. As light plays throughout the day, the scene changes. Within the Market, transparency and light become writing and erasing, and time is an active agent for change.

As a place to experience stories, memories, new identities, Hernandez and Calzadilla's market place invites our engagement in the environment created, thus unfurling a process of the spectator's reflection. This is not an imposed narrated definition or even interpretation about meaning. It is, rather, the effort to evoke something the viewer may have been living before. But as Hernandez told me, "these are stories you can never complete. Traces. Evocative clues, invoking human situations." Hernandez mentions the influence of Beuys, " in the material connecting with cultural experience." The artist as contemporary ethnographer chanels expression, communication, and language, here invoking a philosophical dissolution between art and every day life.

Tracy Hicks's works on the cover and within the art section transform books themselves. They are bound books, turned into sealed and cylindrical objects resembling candles, suggesting light. Hicks's installation work often examines what, as a culture, we tend to collect and preserve. In a recent conversation about the bound books, Hicks spoke of the connection between light and enlightenment. "Books are a way to enlightenment. They represent the continuing process of going on, of expanding your way of seeing. Extending the search. These books are a symbol of that sense of extending, in a very physical sense, rolling them into candles, turning them into light."

The works assembled here bring to the physical realm that which is usually intangible. Each is involved with a sort of immediacy, the immediacy of perception, questions of community, primal stuff: what it means to be a person.

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	Introduction to Selected Work by Terrell James *20th Anniversary Issue of Gulf Coast (30 January 2000):* The artists I have selected for this issue of Gulf Coast are engaged in the transformative activity in art. Process drives discovery. Image is evoked rather than described. The viewer is offered a direct experience of subjectivity, finding an emphasis on the openness of interpretation, and beyond, exploring alternative empathetic relationships. In exploring subjectivity, memory, time, mapping, the body, and text merge as research. Implied is the invitation to "completion" by the viewer. In Walter Hopps's light drawings, apparent accident and incidental mark create an inevitable form. The delicate tracings that result literally are drawn with light on photographic paper, as particular and unrepeatable as the immediate gesture that caused it, recording time and the body's movement. We may name images: twig, cell, cloud; but these things are felt, intuited, not represented. The light drawings are contained in a slender box Hopps constructed (see image checklist page for detail) from discarded television cue cards, found in an alley in Los Angeles, around 1955. Words once making full sentences are truncated, invoking interpretation, suggesting narrative; but again, hold back objective or known meaning. We are thwarted in our effort to read the text, but still we try to invent the narrative. Virgil Grotfeldt's works often involve accident, careful drawing, and preexistent text elements. In the Healing Plants series, Grotfeldt manipulates coal dust on top of ledger sheets from another time. Plants are used in healing; early pieces in the series look toward specific botanical studies. Images are isolated on the page, first as the whole plant, then by its parts: seeds, roots, petals, fruit. Later ones, such as the one included here, become looser in form, less scientific in their reference. The Drawings for the Twenty-first Century and Those Who Cannot See are manipulations of coal dust on Braille text. The sighted can see or "read" the image, but not the Braille text. The blind can "read" the preexisting messages in Braille but not the forms on top. Then the works are exhibited with glass on top, or in reproduction, flattened by the mere fact of photographic reproduction; Grotfeldt says "Now the blind cannot read it." The second part of the title, Those Who Cannot See," refers to all of us, not only the blind. Virgil says, "Who knows what it is? What it means? It's more of a feeling than an understanding." Next we see details from Abdel Hernandez and Fernando Calzdilla's installation The Market from Here: Mise in Scene and Experimental Ethnography. The piece is an environmental recreation of the every day life of Venezuela, evoking imaginary people and activity in the market place. The installation crosses genres of theater and art, dealing aesthetically with ethnography. Here visual art becomes process, a lab and workshop. From room to room within the walls of the installation, objects are transformed as the spectator moves between a stage set and memory. Plastic envelops, veils, traps the objects assembled. Transparency exists in daylight; opacity, at night, as artificial light reflects and shields objects behind plastic. As light plays throughout the day, the scene changes. Within the Market, transparency and light become writing and erasing, and time is an active agent for change. As a place to experience stories, memories, new identities, Hernandez and Calzadilla's market place invites our engagement in the environment created, thus unfurling a process of the spectator's reflection. This is not an imposed narrated definition or even interpretation about meaning. It is, rather, the effort to evoke something the viewer may have been living before. But as Hernandez told me, "these are stories you can never complete. Traces. Evocative clues, invoking human situations." Hernandez mentions the influence of Beuys, " in the material connecting with cultural experience." The artist as contemporary ethnographer chanels expression, communication, and language, here invoking a philosophical dissolution between art and every day life. Tracy Hicks's works on the cover and within the art section transform books themselves. They are bound books, turned into sealed and cylindrical objects resembling candles, suggesting light. Hicks's installation work often examines what, as a culture, we tend to collect and preserve. In a recent conversation about the bound books, Hicks spoke of the connection between light and enlightenment. "Books are a way to enlightenment. They represent the continuing process of going on, of expanding your way of seeing. Extending the search. These books are a symbol of that sense of extending, in a very physical sense, rolling them into candles, turning them into light." The works assembled here bring to the physical realm that which is usually intangible. Each is involved with a sort of immediacy, the immediacy of perception, questions of community, primal stuff: what it means to be a person.