Notes for a Commonplace Book (5)

Carla Rippey:

Whatever our senses pick up is carried to the brain by two pathways, one conscious and rational, and another unconscious and innate. While these perceptions travel toward the cortex, where they will be integrated with other data captured from the environment and with previous associations, they are also traveling toward the amygdala, a much more primitive part of the brain. Sending something to the amygdala is like sending a digital image in low resolution: it arrives right away, but it’s blurry. In no way is it a precise and well-processed image like the one that is formulated in the cortex. It is, we might say, a dirty image. It’s these dirty images that make us confuse, just for an instant, a garden hose with a snake.

I have the idea that whenever an image attracts me, whenever I happen upon a photograph with which I feel some sort of connection, for example, it’s because the image resonates in me at a subconscious level: it generates the same “dirty image” as something I have already stored in my brain.

As a result, the archives of possible material for my work are made up by images that have already triggered a reaction in me. Examining them dispassionately, now ensconced in the "high road" of clear perceptions and conscious associations, my job is to pinpoint the disturbing element and highlight it by means of cropping, the juxtaposition of images, or the construction of a collage. The interpretation is then refined through its translation to drawing, printmaking or painting. In a sort of morphing, I must retransmit it with my own energy.

I like the term "dirty images". They are dirty because their reading is ambivalent, but dirtiness is also associated with the erotic, the perverse, the disturbing, and that which is repressed and feared -- all elements which pertain to the interpretation of my work. After all, one could postulate that I traffic in stolen images: it’s a dirty business.

From Carla Rippey: Dibujo, pintura y grabado (Taller Gráfica Bordes)

Elsewhere (Otherness)

New work by Carla Rippey, at El uso de la memoria.




Rippey writes:

I have to make clear that I use cultural elements from “elsewhere” as an amateur or tourist and not as a student of cultures. The iconography doesn’t imply for me all that it would imply for the natives of these borrowed cultures; my constructions are inventions, perhaps metaphors, a sort of pastiche of elements that come to have, which must assume, a significance distinct from that which they carry in context of their own culture. But the existence of that original, implicit meaning can give the created image another layer of resonance.

The image below is from a separate project, The Figure in the Carpet.


See my earlier post, or, better yet, the artist's blog.

The use of memory (Carla Rippey)

The artist and printmaker Carla Rippey is a native of Kansas City who has lived and worked principally in Mexico since the 1970s, long enough that she has probably come to be more generally regarded as a Mexican artist rather than as an American one, though in fact she is both. Unlike many other American expatriate artists, she has put down permanent roots in Mexico and raised two sons there, and the bulk of her exhibitions have been in Mexican galleries and museums. She seems to be less well known in the US; the few monographs and exhibition catalogs devoted to her work — difficult but not impossible to find here — have been issued by Mexican publishers and museums. The one that I've been able to examine to date was published in 1994, and bears the title El uso de la memoria, which also happens to be the title of her comprehensive (and much more up to date) bilingual blog, an excellent starting point for those who might be interested in her work.

Rippey works in a range of media and with a variety of found materials, especially photographs. In some cases she creates drawings or paintings based on individual photos or assemblages of photos she has found at flea markets or in popular periodicals; at other times she subjects the photos themselves, or reproductions of them, to a variety of overlays and modifications, staining them or sewing thread through their surfaces, for instance. There is a political or feminist edge to many of her images, but the overriding theme is how people are remembered or forgotten or altered over the course of time. The sense of impermanence her work produces echoes her own history as a migrant, one who remembers, moreover, that her ancestors too were immigrants from elsewhere, and who knows that possession of place as of life is illusory and fleeting. Her use of photographs serves to underline the ways in which what we see before us, apparently solid, is subject to being transformed into an image, a two-dimensional ghost that has lost its original vital presence but which, as a memory trace, acquires its own afterlife.

 
Among her recent projects is a treatment of an old black and white photograph of an ornate building, either in ruins or in the process of construction. Rippey has printed the image onto the cover of what appears to be a handmade paper box. When the box is opened it reveals another copy of the image, printed on a much larger sheet of either cloth or paper and folded or bunched up inside the box. The effect is both striking and disconcerting; the building, once so monumental, has become a mere wisp, a thin tissue that could be folded into a pocket or blown away by the wind.

Rippey was a friend of the late Roberto Bolaño, a writer who was himself a multiple migrant, and who reportedly portrayed her in the guise of the minor character of Catalina O'Hara in his novel The Savage Detectives. Both were fascinated by the femicidios of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, the string of largely unsolved killings that since 1993 have taken the lives of hundreds of Mexican women in the vicinity of that troubled border city. Marcela Valdes's excellent article in the Nation (December 8, 2008), which not coincidentally is illustrated by Rippey, is an indispensable source regarding both the Juárez killings and Bolaño's posthumously published masterpiece 2666, which is partly based on them. The section of 2666 that recounts the murders — often in harrowing detail — has much the same disconcerting effect as Rippey's art, as Bolaño's fictionalized retelling simultaneously flattens the actual victims into two dimensions and indelibly preserves an unsettling memory of them that would otherwise have been entirely lost.