Preview
Medium
digital images
Creation Date
2014
Disciplines
Art and Design | Art Practice
Description
This work appeared in Guggle Revo at the Linfield Gallery at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon.
The Air Is Foul Enough Already So I Will Bite Them Back and Choke Them Down displays acrylic paint on a woman's skin.
Artist's Statement
Dear Reader,
I have lost count of the number of times I have tried to start this letter. Had I not composed this digitally, my wastepaper basket would have more crumpled, half-begun missives than it could swallow spilling over its lip. I tried to tell you why I call you Reader when you are in a gallery (you are, for one thing, reading this and will probably spend a few moments trying to decipher the barely recognizable text I've set before you); I tried to tell you about my relationship with language (we have frequent falling outs); I tried to describe the pleasure I find in the letters as series of lines whose arms, legs, shoulders, and spine arch and stiffen in ways that make them splendid little playthings; I tried to tell you how the thrill of hearing dialects garble English phonemes into sounds new and exquisite is like my delight in making familiar characters strange. But all my beginnings lacked the poetry, or charm, or coherence with which I'd like to address you, so I will stop trying to start and end. Perhaps the note would be better suited as one of my word sculptures, for I feel I can seldom coax words into the shape of my thoughts that I conceded and made my thoughts take the form of words: mangled and tangled and unable to convey their message.
Best wishes.
Recommended Citation
Purington, Jana, "The Air Is Foul Enough Already So I Will Bite Them Back and Choke Them Down" (2014). Guggle Revo. Image. Submission 6.
https://digitalcommons.linfield.edu/avc_gugglerevo/6
Comments
Photograph courtesy of Jana Purington.