Wiesedruck :: Prints and Drawings

Opening: Wednesday, May 5, 5-8 pm and Thursday, May 6, 5-8 pm, 2010
Archaeologies at Froelick Gallery

This body of work emerged from an ongoing dialog between the poems of Portland poet Sarah Lantz and my etchings. I discovered her writings as I was creating these images—finding in both a shared temporal quality. Archaeologies is a meditation on collective memories, their loss and disintegration but also their rediscovery through individual histories. Lantz, who passed away suddenly in September 2007 just after the publication of her first book (Far Beyond Triage, Calyx Books), explored themes of the passing of time, absence, deterioration and loss in her poems. She muses, “How ludicrous we are,/ one moment a conjunction/ of trembling, the next/ the light, though light/ cannot reside anywhere/ nor the endings be always happy. My images, primarily through plants, elicit ephemerality— their growth, decay and dispersal of seed, eventually disintegrating to leave only the fibrous skeleton.

I hope to capture a lightness, a sense of space, in spite of the ever-present fragility and mortality, reflected in my memories of desert winter landscapes— golden sun-bleached grass, charcoal woody stems, white snow, rust flowers.
While working, I draw plants from life in an attempt to impart a sense of gesture and emotion. Complex organic forms act as vehicles for exploring my formal interests. I improvise with the natural form in front of me as I draw, twisting it, lengthening or shortening a stem, to find just the right angles and spaces on the page, not unlike the composition of words on a page or the rhythm of their sequence.
This set of etchings was created for a limited edition artist book, Archaeologies of Loss. The thoughts that began the book continued to inspire and influenced work created at my artist residency in Belgium a year ago last April as well as all that followed throughout the year, finally evolving into this exhibition. The prints and book were funded in part by a grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council, Portland Oregon.

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April- May 30, 2010 exhibition: FENCES
showing at Portland Center Stage, Gerding Theater at the Armory

prints
Bramble Fence I, 2010, sumi ink & dye on kozo paper, 32 x 108"

prints
Bramble Fence II, 2010, sumi ink & dye on kozo paper, 32 x 108"

prints
Mesh Fence, 2010, sumi ink & dyed mitsumata paper, 29 x 55"

prints
Entangled, 2010, sumi ink & dyed mitsumata paper, 29 x 55"

To view more prints and drawings by Sarah Horowitz, please visit: Froelick Gallery artist page.

This series of four large drawings is being shown in conjunction with the play The Chosen based on the book by Chaim Potok. I was inspired by The Chosen to revisit with some ideas I'd begun working out a long time ago. They relate to boundaries, divisions, demarcations of territory, and borders between people and places: the fences we create in space and in relationships as well as in politics and war. One of my sources for these bramble fences is the uncut bits of land between agricultural fields, especially in Europe. There is always a dividing area with a scraggly tree, brambles, weeds and sometimes some broken fence that delineates one patch of land from another. In The Chosen, a wide gap or tall fence separates two Orthodox Jewish boys who have so much in common and yet are still divided by beliefs and family.
I worked from life on large sheets of mitsumata and kozo papers for these works that I colored with blue and black pigments and then sized.