-003 Jan Dickey
If there is one thing that you can change in a previous project of yours, what would it be?
Photo by Farfar Studio.I sometimes think back to my thesis show at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, which I titled cover the earth in honor of the Sherwin-Williams paint company. My overarching concept of that show was to consider Paint, all paint, as one hyperobject that moves over all human things: walls, cars, roads, artworks. Humans like to laminate things, we try to seal them off from one another – creating divisions and artificial boundaries between the flow of matter and energy. But Paint, the hyperobject, has a life of its own. It cracks, peels, and flows around according to the laws of Nature. This is especially true in Hawaiʻi where it is humid and biological life is always trying to find a way.
My thesis exhibition consisted of pouring or lathering white and pigmentless milk paint onto canvases, and onto sheets of drywall. I also attached and removed the paintings on canvas from those sheets of drywall, and faced some paintings toward the wall, blurring the boundaries between the painted fabric and the painted wall panels. I was pretty much focused on the relationship between the edges of drywall panels and the edges of stretched canvases (easel paintings) – smudging the boundary between the art objects and the space they inhabit by stressing the material life they share.
I wouldn't change that focus, but what I wish I had messed around with more was the paint on the drywall – and, I guess, generally the drywall substrate itself. I was really experimenting with the canvases materially: soaking them in natural dyes, like madder root, and leaving them under potted plants to let soil slowly seep into them for weeks. I was weathering the paintings to stress out the fibers of the canvases and to compromise the laminations of paint. But I could have treated the drywall more harshly; and I don't know what stopped me. Maybe I felt like I had gone far enough? Like there would be more time for this later?
But you can never go back. You can't repeat the past. The present just keeps rolling along and next thing you know it you are paper macheing traffic cones in Tokyo. Now I think the drywall got away too clean!
Images courtesy of the artist.