back from china...
(the blog i kept while I was away...)
a recent exercise in believing in the part of my art practice that looks like it happens in a studio:
The works that I acknowledge as representative of my studio activities are reticent things. They are all models, experiments, demonstrations, exercises, and visual maps of intellectual processing, but they are not always born for the same cause. While my work outside of the studio is occupied with fostering breakdowns in communication such as the reading of lips or the unscripted and porous recollection of past events, my objects, paintings, and drawings are interested in impossible dimensions of conversation, architecture, and the body.
This work also investigates power structures and their feintability. Most of my sculptures explore the leveling of spatial hierarchies, and the puzzle of escaping psychological and corporeal containers. They also seek to gather together disparate physical spaces, social persuasions, and time frames for conversations that flirt equally with the models of porch-sitting old-timer talks, and heated, public debates. Some of my drawings (which you may not have seen) are Illustrations of trust exercises designed for two people to physically (and consensually) enter into a dynamic of puppet and puppeteer drawn from a classic talent show routine. This dynamic is twisted to focus on the disconnect between the arms and the body though they present themselves as whole; a vision of possessed-ness, the sense of being occupied and animated by something that doesn’t quite belong.
The forms of my social participation, the language that I use to describe my subjectivity, and the activities that I engage in when I am not making art, all work on my art practice. In this way, the meaning of my artwork can be refined by queerness, criminality, my bookshelf, or my bank statement.
The strategy for my practice is built on undermining my own thinking in order to trick myself out of predictable patterns and work from a place that is blind and insightful. I act as a misinterpreter between myself and myself, and between myself and my work. As with the psychoanalysis of patients and the cross-examination of suspects, I am always trying to force a fault and create a slippage.
Emily Kay Atchison
contact me at:
