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 Standadization Takes Root
Tree Machine: Standardization Takes Root (2010)
4x4; A Printeresting Curatorial Project Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA
Woven 10'x15' woodblock print on paper
This
piece—Tree Machine: Standardization Takes Root—is the second in series of six
large print installations I am currently working on. The starting point is the pseudo-historical notion of
‘Course of Empire,’ originating in 19th century American popular
history. America was to be the new
Rome, with all of its glorious and tragic stages: from the primitive, pastoral,
and heroic, to the consummation, destruction, and entropic. In my version, these six stages of
empire follow two interrelated trajectories—a social history of control along
side a history of technological advances in image, representation, print, and
propaganda. In this piece—the
‘second stage’—the technology is black and white woodblock printing with its
linear representation of reality, the imagery is from nature to mechanization,
and the intent is standardization through the grid.
Stately Pleasure Dome Decree (2010)
Philagraphika 2010
Seraphin Gallery
Woodblock print on paper (9'x16'
installed)
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
(Samuel
Taylor Coleridge Kubla Khan; or, A Vision
in a Dream: A Fragment 1816)
A Stately Pleasure Dome Decree is a collision of landscape,
colonization and empire engendered by Coleridge's poem, and Durer's large
multi-block print, Triumphal Arch of
Maximillian. In writing Kubla Kahn, Coleridge was inspired by
the following passage: "Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built, and a
stately garden thereunto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground were in closed
with a wall.''
In Stately Pleasure Dome Decree, three large scale print panels form a
dreamy landscape in which a stately pleasure dome emerges from a boldly
gestural scene with a jagged sky and tree with Christopher Columbus' flag.
The central structure in the
print acts simultaneously as cathedral and pleasure palace, embodying the
enthralling siren song of archietecture as power. The intricately carved cathedral structure is a reinterpretation
of Triumphal Arch, a 16th century
woodblock print by Albrecht Durer (recently displayed at the PMA). The original print featured
interchangeable panels in an architectural armature. The panels, functioning as propaganda, could be removed,
replaced, or relocated depending upon political necessity and imperial
whim. In Stately Pleasure Dome Decree, these
placards have been left blank, the whole structure mirrors itself in a visually
slippery reflection.
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