| Jean Sirius collage March 1 - April 18 Reception: Mar. 13, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m. |
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| Click on images for larger view. | |
Email: herself@jeansirius.com Website: www.jeansirius.com |
| Artist Statement The collages displayed here were gathered into the book Seeing Double/Rose Window. They were, with two exceptions, made during the year I cared for my lover at home. They are a stubborn protest against entropy, a flame lit in defiance of the heat death of the universe. The work can be read as a visual history of that time. In “Seeing Double,” which uses monochromatic palettes, I am especially concerned with the way each fragment flows into the next, how hard or soft that meeting is. The outside edges are dictated by the materials, where the image in the magazine stopped. They are irregular, like life and death. The order in the book is roughly the order of creation. First there is the realization that Cara was dying (“Blue”), then some brave reassurance, or perhaps obstinate denial (“Pink”). “Brown” sounds a foreboding note. “Orange” and “Purple” are pure escapism, daydreams of more congenial worlds. “Green” is also other-worldly, but reassuring, intended to heal. My friend Lynn Dow murmured, “It isn't often you see despair and desolation expressed in bright yellow.” In “Red,” sleep deprivation psychosis was beginning to set in. By the time I got to “Gold,” I was fairly shouting (without opening my lips) “The light, my love! It’s time.” The final pair is a formal closure, completed in December of 1997, six months after Cara’s death. “Black” is black and “White” is white, but each contains the other. “Black” is stately, peaceful, both distant and immediate. “White” is death and compassion, trust and abiding affection. “Rose Windows” is a meditation on continuation. Circles and squares, circles in squares, flowers in circles, flowers in flowers. It’s about light in darkness, darkness in light. If “Seeing Double” explored alternative realities, “Rose Windows” deepened my roots into this one. The process of piecing together a torn paper collage is slow, deliberate, contemplative: rather like making a quilt. When I was a wee pagan child, the thing that attracted me to churches was the stained glass. In Gothic cathedrals, round rose windows were dedicated to Mary, Mother of God. The series follows the wheel of the year. The names are those used by contemporary pagans for the quarter and cross-quarter days. I started with “Ostara,” the vernal equinox, using the earliest greens against the intense joy of winter’s end, and “Beltaine,” full spring, with flowers and mature leaves. The ground of “Mid-summer” is the deep blue the sky seemed to me in June, in Kansas, whereas in “Lughnasadh,” I invoke the green of the inside of a deep forest on a lazy August day, and the sky pale with heat. “Mabon,” autumn, and “Samhain,” Hallowmas, kindle a flame against the growing dark, the inimical cold. “Yule,” the winter solstice, and “Imbolc,” Candlemas or Groundhog Day, turn entirely away from the outside world, and warm themselves with passions both carnal and incorporeal. It is, of course, possible to approach the pieces individually, in random order, without any words at all. |