Chloe Mandy: In Residence at the Project Space
November 4 – December 15 2013
Part 1
Having a residency in a space that’s literally 40 feet from your studio might sound a little bit of a waste of gunpowder, but being in the four uninterrupted white walls and newly painted floor, entirely empty square that is the Queen of Hungary Project Space has been very productive.
The initial intention was to use the space to do some drawings for my upcoming show in May, The Necessary Angel at Salthouse Church. The Necessary Angel, is the title of a book of short essays by the poet Wallace Stevens, he posits the theory that absolute fact includes everything that the imagination includes, this idea is one that I wanted to work with..
I paint directly in the landscape, this rural Norfolk landscape that is so managed and ordered, but it’s the gaps in human interventions that allow changes to occur, driven by nature, so that our understanding of the landscape is just super imposed pockets, of familiarly, fragments of knowledge, recognition of patterns that reoccur. I wanted my experience of painting in the landscape at specific places, in certain times, to inform the paintings. But not limit my experience of the landscape to a purely visual response. I wanted the landscapes to have a sense of heterotopias, a heterotopia is an anti –location, and it consists of an ensemble of places outside of all places, even though they are at the same time effectively localizable. And within these landscapes, I wanted to place figures, figures, not as pastoral fantasy, or credible participants, like farmer’s or dog walkers, but as imagined poetic images, integrated and as essential to the landscape as any of the other elements in the image. All of us see the world that is the product of our own thoughts, and feelings, so I wanted to allow images to surface, to appear and to disappear, and not to summon them or try to construct them in a conscious way, not trying to replicate life, rather to see it as life, as its having a life of its own.
Chloe Mandy
