Dear Yuna,
I truly believe that if your beloved Georgiana Houghton had the opportunity to witness your practice, she would have smiled and nodded in appreciation and understanding. If she could travel through time from mid XIX century Britain and end up in today’s Brussels, the spiritualist and painter would feel somewhat at home in front of your work.
I do know you love Georgina’s work: her dancing scratches and her evanescent, apparently compass-made spirals, evoked by her seances and ghostly dreams.
Like you, she had a fascination and a command for the medium of photography, in particular as a means to represent the ghosts (like her sister Zilla’s) that populated her imagination and, according to her, her physical reality. In 1882 she published a collection of photographs titled Chronicles of the Photographs of Spiritual Beings and Phenomena Invisible to the Material Eye, in an attempt to capture in static pictures, the overlapping temporalities of people living and the one of people no longer walking in this plane of existence. Portraits of solid people hugging vanishing silhouettes, created via double-exposure techniques.
I’m convinced Georgiana would see a similar need to emphasize diachronic presence in your series Unsquared: she would marvel at your intent to expand from the arbitrarily dictated limitation of the medium, the shapes and distribution of light beyond the Western art canon, through historical and atavistic signs that seem to reach us today as effectively as they would thousands of years ago.
The graphic symbols you have utilized in your work, sometimes lifted from cave paintings, land the meaning of your work to a prolific a-historicity. And your plates—containing crystalized movements—play with another kind of division of time and societal classification. High/decorative-low art; the personal time of domesticity and care/the public time of politics: dichotomies that are conflated and disarmed by installing the pieces as paintings on the wall of a white cube AND as manifestos on a public building. The photos of nails that are making an appearance in your most recent work seem like a natural prosecution of this deliberate disruption of a preconceived hierarchy of expression. Nails, before they became anything else, were weapons, instruments for survival. But isn’t survival and self-actualization what people do when painting their nails, doing their make-up, using their bodies like a public canvass, conflating the privacy of their bodies with the public relevance of their behavior? This is how many will finally get a seat at the table, by scratching and then ripping the door open with their painted nails.
I myself have been preoccupied with the access to high art and who is still excluded from it, especially after reading Rachele Borghi and Brigitte Vasallo, who are teaching me about the possibilities offered by the manipulation of public space and the means of cultural production, like printing, writing, blogging, and of course nail art. Your nails are your private gallery, a way to access the fruition and production of canonized masters at the same time. Once mounted on the wall, the low art of nail painting shines on the dignifying stage of public display.
Recently “rediscovered”, Houghton is one of those people whose contribution has been for decades undervalued, downplayed, or downright forgotten. Maybe because of her gender or maybe because of the un-seriousness of some of her paranormal claims. We know she was always deserving a place in the canon, not only during her time but throughout history. She would appreciate the titles of many of your works too, the constant gratitude you express towards your predecessors. Above all, she would recognize the communion of two worlds, photography and painting, public and private, canon and low art. In it —don’t you agree?—she would have seen a vertigo of potential and hope.
- Valentina
