"Blue
is the Longing," explores the complexities of intimacy and focuses on the
feelings of unmet expectations. Unfulfilled desires can lead to disappointment.
As humans, how do we deal with longings that are never satisfied, boundaries
that cannot be broken through, and seeking that never leads to discovery?
The process of achieving intimacy is irregular, uneven, and challenging, but
overcoming these obstacles is rewarding. Perhaps the first step toward intimacy
is a realistic perspective. One that accounts for some turbulence, some
annoyance, and some irritation.
Blue is the Longing is an series that explores the nature of frustration. The
show seeks to surround the viewer with the visual translation of this typically
undesired feeling. For it is not that we can eliminate all yearnings from
relationships, but rather, it is that we should learn to become more expectant
and accepting of these voids. That we become more yielding towards the gap of
what is desired and what is received.
The series contains 14 photographic prints, four large photographic collage
installations that adhere to the gallery wall and a projected video triptych
(Almost).
Each photograph within the gallery contains the color blue. Author Rebecca
Solnit writes that in landscape paintings the color blue denotes distance and:
“The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude
and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are
not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place
of those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you
and the mountains… Blue is the color of longing for the distances you never
arrive in, for the blue world.”
The color blue within the work represents the gap, the desire, the longing,
whatever you want to call that unsettling feeling of reaching for but not
grasping onto.
The four site-specific vinyl collages (from the series La Falta) utilize the
image of the horizon. Similarly to the ‘blue of distance,’ the horizon is a
place that is desired but never quite reached. Each horizon is broken, folded,
ruptured, divided or extracted from the image. The newly constructed horizons,
with their sharp angles and fractured lines, create a new landscape, both
formally and conceptually. When the horizon is removed or altered, the new
disjointed line of vision becomes integral to the formal elements of the image,
the void and ruptures are now part of the resolved composition.
Each of the three videos loop and their circular format cuts immediately before the expected visual climax. Projected simultaneously within proximity of each other, if the viewer continues to watch, they would be forced to be patient, accepting the repetitive nature of the loop and eventually foregoing their expectation for visual resolution.