Return II

graphite, conte, photograph, tinted, transparent Plexiglas, h 33' x w 25"

Exhibition Statement:

L’Espace 234, Montreal: “Ropes and Knots”
Certain phenomena in the natural and manmade cosmos invite, seduce, or compel the artist to render them in graphite line and wash: certain shapes and textures; certain implicit qualities of weight, mass, and potential force or energy. The ropes that wind, stretch, loop, curl, and resolve themselves into knots in the images comprising “Ropes and Knots” carry this siren quality. However, the rope motif, the “constant” in the exhibit, was not chosen solely for its aesthetic qualities; nor, for that matter, were the contextual elements: the rendered or photographed “variables” brought into play in the work: the canyons, the horses, the weathered beams, the ancient pillars.

The ropes are alive with connotation. At once flexible and tensile, a length of rope can link, bind, and secure as easily as it can strangle; it can hoist heavy objects up, suspend them in midair, and gradually let them down, a singular feat carried out by what may seem, at a distance, a line in space.  Moreover, as quickly as we can envision a noose,we can as readily see, in the mind’s eye, the ultimate rope connector, the umbilical cord.

The images in “Ropes and Knots” were developed recently in response to several decades of travel, in particular to England, to the American West, and to Israel. Initially envisoning the ropes as sturdy ladders leading from desert clifftops to canyon floors in Arizona and new Mexico, the artist actually borrowed their forms from photos taken at nautical sites in Northern England. Only in dreams and in art can such transference, meeting, and merging take place.