Caitlin-mcc03 - Caitlin MccARThy
More Posts from Caitlin-mcc03 and Others
Clarissa Sligh - What's happening with Momma?
Clarissa Sligh, What’s Happening With Momma? (Outside), 1987, Silk-screened with acrylic ink on 100% rag Coventry 320 gram soft white paper and 100% rag Stonehenge 250 gram cream paper.
What’s Happening with Momma? is a dimensional, house-shaped book that unfolds to tell an autobiographical story from the author. The book is shaped like her childhood home, a row house with steps where she sat as a child hearing scary noises coming from within. Sligh engages her viewers to walk through the rooms of this house to learn about her memories of her sister’s birth – her momma’s screams; her brother trembling; her rocking back and forth; the stork bringing her new sister.
thoughts on memory
louise bourgeois / aftersun (2022) / joan didion / phoebe bridgers / carmen maria machado / st vincent / lisa ko
Rob Swainston - Printstallations
PLEXUS (2011), woodblock print on paper with mirrors.
In Front of Behind the Wall, (2011), woodblock print on paper.
Zimmer Frei, (2012), woodblock print on fabric with wood and wire.
Rob Swainston reminds us we are not just consumers of icons, but producers and observers of images. All images are historically negotiated assemblages between humans, machines, materials, and social structures. In a society where social knowledge and power have become pure image, the print technologies historically central to this transformation can act as double-agent. Artists working in print media can be chameleons moving between image makers and image reproducers. Image reproducers are technocrats, proto-machines, and images-smiths in building the spectacle world order. In their perfection they ask no questions. Artists are image makers showing an image constructed, built, repeated, overprinted, coded, decoded, and endlessly negotiated. For the printmaker, the press bed is not a window of illusion, it is the space of social tinkering. The artist is a hacker. Rob Swainston performs this hack through two interrelated bodies of work—series of unique multiples and printstallations. Installations such as ‘A New System Every Monday’ and ‘All that is Solid Melts into Air’ mix print media, sculpture, painting, drawing and video to point out architectural, institutional, historical, and social spaces. Series of standardized works such as ‘Who Owns the Sky?’ and ‘Propositions’ move between representation and abstraction such that neither of these categories are important. The viewer participates in an “archeology of uncovering”, discerning numerous processes and images containing multiplicities of narratives culminating in an uncovering of the “significant image” and the realization “I see myself seeing myself.”
Emma Parker
“My work explores the darker and often hidden aspects of being human: fear, shame, abandonment, despair and the broken – with an occasional twist of humour added for sanity. I use discarded and worn materials in my work and see the act of making with them as a process of transformation and salvaging of the broken self."
“The use of thread and stitch helps me make connections and piece the broken together whilst the repetitive nature of hand sewing is a soothing rhythm, which nurtures and helps mend. In my work I often include fragments of narratives or imagery that may tell only part of a story, leaving it up to the viewer to find their own ending.”
Frank Halmans
In his work, Halmans often explores the domestic world and sees a home as a place where life fluctuates between a public and a private sphere. Halmans examines how we as humans live in these two different areas. One could call the artist a 'house expert': he is an accomplished carpenter, plumber and bricklayer and therefore knows everything about houses. Within his work, however, houses or parts of them assume a kind of dream shape. In this respect, his series of "architectural vacuum cleaners" reflects his vision well.
"Forgetting is alarming," he says, "everything has been in vain, meaningless, if you were content with forgetting."
Basement II, 2014.
Even more Rooms for Reading, 2014.
Some New Rooms, 2021.
"Is it the fear of forgetting that triggers the desire to remember, or is it perhaps the other way around?" (Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, 2003)
Celina Vleugels
How Can I become You series, 2019, Acrylic and embroidery on different fabrics
To the Temple of Childhood Memories, 2021, jacquard piece of an oil pastel drawing, wool and linen, 120 x 170 cm unique
Even when the season changes, you will always be rememembered. 2020, Industrial weaving combined with hand embroidery pieces 128cm x 145cm
Pablo Rasgado
Within Pablo Rasgado’s Work, the surfaces of the walls often are the detonators of his research, which are revealed as evidence of complex situations that lie underneath them, and by doing so, they highlight features of the site that usually remain invisible. His interventions in urban spaces draw their conclusions, by the information gathered though the study of the accumulated social experience within an architectural setting. They try to place the attention towards an inquiry about history, function and form by questioning the relationship between function and design within specific contexts; the analysis of urban change and its cultural value; and the potential of inactive spaces within cities.
Pablo Rasgado, Mural , 2019, Construction materials from the demolition of a house, 244 x 760 cm.
Pablo Rasgado’s work transforms ordinary materials from public and institutional spaces into compelling abstract compositions. By reappropriating fragments of painted walls—whether from city streets or temporary museum installations—he captures layers of visual and social history embedded in these surfaces. His approach preserves the essence of a moment, frozen in time, yet recontextualized. Rasgado’s Unfolded Architecture series, for instance, abstracts specific moments in museum and art history, echoing a conceptual homage to Mexican muralism. Rather than illustrating historical scenes, Rasgado utilizes fragments of everyday walls, rich with contextual layers, to create abstractions that resonate with historical depth. Through this innovative reuse of space’s “background” materials, Rasgado forges a direct connection to Mexico’s artistic past, infusing his work with the physical residue of lived experiences and cultural narratives.
Pablo Rasgado, When the symbols shatter, 2019, Structure in wood, light, and acrylic, 144 x 62 x 14 in., 366 x 158 x 36 cm.
Pablo Rasgado, Ventana, 2019, Bricks, 52 x 66 in., 133 x 168 cm.
