Visiting Artist: Penelope Umbrico

"Embarrassing Books"

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the VCU Visiting Artist Lecture by Penelope Umbrico. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with her and left feeling excited and inspired. Her energetic, self-depreciating humor seemed almost sitcom worthy at times. She is truly a genuine character with incredible insight and a completely unique way of making art - with meaning - out of things that otherwise, are devoid of art and meaning. Although the talk started out a bit rocky, with lot's of "um's" and pauses, she quickly settled in. I knew that I was going to love her when she described one of her early exhibitions, the series of out-of-focus plates, etc. from catalogs that she filled a galleries walls with, as "a purgatory of consumerism." Such poetry in truth!

"Instances of Casually Flung Clothing"

The majority of her work felt very personal to me, as I know every one of the elements in those catalogs she gleaned her images from. I have always been interested in the "art of perfection" and from a very young age would study those catalogs so that I would know how achieve it. I would play "interior design" with my own bedroom; always rearranging the furniture, finding new and interesting things to put on the wall, different ways to display my books, knick knacks, toys. Those catalogs I studied long ago, those deign principles of "perfection," have stuck with me. As I survey my apartment today, I find books and magazines used as pedestals, bookcases and cabinets arranged beautifully and purposefully - by color and size- everything has to do with aesthetics. I may even be guilty of purposefully "casually flinging" the throw across the arm of my sofa... it's the little things that keep perfection from being to stuffy, right?

It it the "casually flung clothing" that relates to my current work the most. She spoke of how it portrayed fictitious people, may one wonder who had placed that garment there, where they had gone, and when they would return. I have been working with ideas in which scenery depicts that a person has just been there or interacted with the space but there are no people in the picture. I like the idea that the viewer has to make up their own tale as to who the person was, what they were doing and where they have gone. In the artists that I have seem do this successfully, it is all about the casualness, and nonchalant feeling, that make the images work.

I also loved how she used the phrase "emptying out of meaning". Another line that is poetic in its telling of truth. She used it to describe the bookshelves in which the books were all turned so that their spines faced the back of the self and the monochromatic spectrum of white pages filled the visible front. It truly made me consider the consequences of "perfection." While aesthetically pleasing, those bookshelves represent nothing more than a generalized meaning of a "book". Nothing specific; no great works, no moving love stories, no cute fairy tales or profound poetry. She also used the phrase to describe the fake initials that adorned the things that could be monogrammed in the catalogs. Not real people or families; letters, chosen for their shape and continuity most likely. A fictitious family, void of history and meaning, created to entice the consumer: "This could be your family's initials right here!"

The monogram scnario reminded me of a night when my grandma came to dinner in a sweater that had a "logo" that the rest of us didn't recognize. When questioned, she didn't miss a beat in explaining that she had found it at "The Closet" - a sort of thrift store her church runs and where she volunteers on a fairly regular basis - and liked the sweater so much that she didn't mind that it had someone else initials on it. Of course the rest of us were quite amused by this and spent most of dinner speculating about who this sweater's original owner was and what their story was. I am intrigued by the difference between this real person's monogrammed belonging found in a thrift store and the fictitious monograms used to sell products in a world of fabricated perfection.