Although word and image have longtime been intimate bedfellows, an overview of [most] recent Montreal, artist-com-writer endeavours witnesses only broken plots, shattered language, decomposed harmony, and randomly-mixed logic -- in essence, an impoverished rant of dépassé “art speak”- hyperbole. Might it be that many [post]po-mo artists actually came to embrace a heterogeneity without hierarchy -- a value[less] system without boundaries -- and so assumed that if they could, in fact, successfully express themselves in paint (or other medium), it followed [automatically] that they were proficient in word ? ...
Lynn Millette’s “Interior Experience” -- a 2003 - 2006, collection / presentation of large-scaled, acrylic on canvas paintings (with complementary text) -- is an exception to the above-mentioned, clichéd tendency. Millette, at once, [perhaps unknowingly] gave nod to an ancient Mesopotamian thought: “writing is the mother of eloquence and the father of artists” [see the artist’s Ph’d dissertation dealing with “the experience of artmaking, body, self and word as ontological environment”, Concordia University, 2005), and went onto display a sense of being [today] for which few of us have any single concept or status in our [much-too-much] rationally-organized, mental life.
Entering the gallery, and moving clockwise through the space [initially without the benefit of text], various phenomenological associations were immediate, ‘real’ and almost electric. Viewers were bombarded with echoes of scientific study -- reflections / reminiscences [actual or imaginatively-extrapolated] of days of ‘enlightenment’ with one eye to the microscope and a nose in the textbooks of biology and / or mineralogy... Millette’s paintings were instantly powerful and emotional pathways modulating a spontaneous expression / experience of the universal ‘self’ ...
‘Ocean (viewed from within)’, 2005 -- the first canvas by the door -- cast a jellyfish-shaped, allusion to a neuron-sparked, gentle ‘epiphany’; [next] a composition with a series of concentric rings (right-ground) shot a ‘spinal’-arc (mid-space) to a small-coloured explosion (far left) -- the human brain’s ‘medulla oblongata’ firing through the ‘foramen magnum’ into the spinal cord to ‘ignite’ sensations? ; and [then] two, much-detailed panels -- one entitled: “Weaving Emotions” -- suggested the intricate patterning of microscopically-viewed animal-tissue.
... Culminating the exhibition project -- [logically] the two largest compositions --“Dream Interrupted”,2003, a diptych, and the most-freshly-painted, “untitled”, 2006 -- were rich to be mined for further allusion to the evocative power of instinctive memory . In both works, the “neuroimaging” of thought and the phenomena of consciousness mysteriously conjoined. ... [More fanciful now]: The pulsating, white-on-black lines of “Dream Interrupted” [urgently] whispered of heartbeat monitoring charts, sub-oceanic, (geological) surveys of volcanic islands [violently] coming-into-being, or sharp-pointed sword jabs [and subsequent ‘splashes’ / ripples] into the wetlands of sensory experience. The right-hand panel of the [overall] ominously dark “Dream ...” added a tach of colour and extended the splash / ripple effect.
... “Untitled”, 2006, collapsed the organic and the mineral in an elegant ‘visual’ twist on a ‘soma’ [a.k.a. : a “perikaryon’ -- from the Greek for “body”]. Its’ [‘myelin’] sheath -- bridging analogies to a ‘dendrite tree’ [mass, left] and an ‘axon terminal’ [mass, right] -- sprouted ‘crystalline’ attachments vaguely similar to micro-sketches of the elements molybdenum (commonly used in rifle-barrels) and titanium [from ‘Titan’ -- a reference to a superhuman task]. -- the sci-fi, inkling of an impending cyber-marriage between flesh and steel ?
Finally, after a ‘wildly’ interpretive perusal of the paintings, a reading, absorbing and paraphrasing of the artist’s written statement(s) of intent: Millette sought to “record the process of self-reflection”, (...) “to focus on the sensations inside her body and trace the anatomical journey of her thoughts”. (...) While focusing on her physical state “metaphors emerged in her imagination” (...) Her paintings “came from deep inside and materialized on the surface of the canvases” (...) “Line, like an electrical current, marked her experience of time” (...) “an accumulation of coiled lines created hills and valleys that reflected an internal landscape of sensory experience”. (...) Beneath her, the artist imagined “cables, lines and other networks like nerves, veins and tissue“ (...) “The bridge she crosses from the inside to the outside of her body when she makes art is not the same bridge she crosses when she speaks or writes” (...) -- BUT ASSUREDLY that bridge was a fabrication by one and the same architect / engineer -- one artist much emotively stabile in fleshing-out cognitive processes relating to perception, interpretation, imagination, memory and [crucially] language !!
Paradoxical as it may seem, Millette’s way of allowing subterrainial ‘things’ to become visible and alive, might be read as an affirmative effort to just let things be. Afterall, [realistically] is our current language system prepared to accept such integrating, passive-activity, all-the-while inhibiting an ‘aesthetic’ that might endorse the production of non-products ? ... “Interior Experience” [re]presents various elusive holotropic states of awareness dealing with the concept of absolute consciousness vs. the “void” (the void being the source of all creation).
Picture: ...“Being is in nothingness ... and nothingness is being in the form of being”
[Azriel of Gerona, in the thirteenth century]
T.L. Mtl. 2007
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