East-West, graphite on paper, 13 x 45”, 2006
Degrees of Separation was a solo exhibition presented at Women and Their Work Gallery (Austin, TX) that explored themes of transience and impermanence, while calling attention to sites and spaces normally taken for granted. The highway was the show’s central metaphor, that meandering line on a map, designed to take us somewhere else. Degrees of Separation strove to build deeper understandings of where we are, physically and psychologically, in a given moment.
Drawings, embroideries and two interactive works were presented amidst hundreds of words and sentence fragments stenciled to the walls, floor and ceiling of the gallery, and in hallways, offices and bathrooms throughout the building. The words were culled from overheard conversations and personal journal entries, literally filling the space with noiseless chatter, punctuated in places, truncated or hushed in others, activating baseboards, unpatched drywall holes, ceiling fixtures and floor paint scratches with incomplete statements.
The drawings and embroideries employed freeway construction plans, civic engineering documents and newspaper articles about unrealized road projects as source material; all were painstakingly made, stitched by hand or drawn using a technique that traces a source in graphite, then burnishes the tracing to paper, resulting in a piece that resembles a letterpress print.
The two installations were equally labor intensive. Landscape consisted of a small room filled waist-high with shredded roadmaps, with bits of text hidden underneath on the walls and floors. At its entrance, a bowl of assorted, pre-made text stencils invited gallery visitors to place their own word choices on the installation walls in order to participate in a growing and evolving conversation. Parting Gifts persuaded people to venture outside the gallery to sites rarely experienced on foot, through video documentation and postcards with maps and images (described in detail here).
For a PDF of the show’s catalog, with essay written by Regine Basha, click here.
