Leslie Atik, Notes on a Rose, hand painted marking tags, map pins, chalk and paint

“It’s exciting to be here, I want to thank Amie Potsic for her curatorial vision and bringing Tara O’Brien and me together for this exciting project.” said Leslie Atik at the opening of Thread of Thought at Center for Emerging Visual Artists.  “I want to tell you a little about my work, it really grows out of my love of language, that’s the first place it starts.  I love language and grammar, I’m one of those people who like to diagram sentences and I like conjugating verbs and all that sort of stuff.  It took me a long tome, believe me, to get here but I finally got to the point where I wanted to make that the stuff of my artwork.  So, that’s the beginning place and the thing that I really love is thread and anything to do with thread.  Textile people out there understand that, if you like to knit or crochet or weave, I started realizing and not in a linear way but there are a lot of things that overlap when you talk about language and you talk about textiles.  There are a lot of metaphors of textiles that are used in describing language but at a basic level when you talk about language you talk about surface and a structure that generates that surface.  And that’s something that language shares with textile, so, when I’m talking about structure I mean the grammar, how the sentence is put together, not neccessarily what it means.  That obviously is a layer of it, the underneath part is what interests me in textiles, too.  So, those units make up the surface – I could talk forever about that stuff.”

Leslie Atik, Notes on a Rose, hand painted marking tags, map pins, chalk and paint

“Fast forward, the other thing that may be of biographical interest is I taught Spanish for many years and so I was at the blackboard back in the day when you actually stood at the blackboard with a piece of chalk.  And I realized that something else I wanted to bring into my art making was, I thought, ‘Well, Jeez, this is mark-making’, and I worked at bringing my chalkboard into my work.  It’s a linear fashion I’m describing but this is what happened.”

Notes on a Rose, Leslie Atik at Center for Emerging Visual Artists

This piece is called Notes on a Rose, it’s a series of pieces that are similar to this and what I’m doing is marking the language.  But each one is different, I’ve marked different things, I’ve structured them differently.  And I thank Amie because any time I can work directly on the wall it really excites me.  I like the idea that at the end of this exhibition this piece is going to be erased.  It has that temporal element to it…it’s built on two texts, the middle text is from Romeo and Juliet and it’s the famous scene where Juliet is asking, ‘Why is your name Romeo?‘  That which we call a rose by any other name would smell so sweet.  The middle passage is about names, therefore in the grammar I immediately thought of nouns – names and nouns.  So I marked – all these patterns are marking places in the grammar where there were nouns – the little tags that I buy at Staples are called marking tags.  So I’m literally marking the language and I’m mapping them because I’m using little map pins on the placement as well.  Each of these little tags has been hand painted in watercolor.”

“The text on either side is a little excerpt from Gertrude Stein‘s writing, A Rose is a Rose.  So I just repeated it over and over and to me that seemed like a textile to repeat that unit, A Rose is a Rose, and on this side I marked the vowels that repeat and on that side is the consonants.  There’s another piece around the side there that’s based on a play and the one over there is based on Spanish, those who speak Spanish know there are two types of being to express the verbs ‘to be’ in Spanish, one referring to the state of things which is the outside and the other one is more essential kind of being.  That’s basically the idea that helped me structure that piece.”

Leslie Atik at Center for Emerging Visual Artists, Dream Notes, hand painted marking tags, map pins, chalk and paint

“When I talk about different layers of language sometime I don’t just use the black and white because this rose idea was so strong I said, ‘OK, let’s just have fun with the color rose.’  I just used the idea of the rose and made that the color palette.  The tags I just paint by the hundreds.  The surface on the wall is just house paint, interior latex paint, right on the wall.  If you come around to the side this is one of my favorite views of the piece, I really am playing with the idea of the text in the textile, so the idea here is that a text is generating textiles.  The erasing is purposeful, it’s kind of developed through my work, to create this piece I do a lot of work at home first getting my handwriting to do what I want it to do in the space I want to work in.  But I like erasing for formal reasons, I like the graying that it adds to my palette but also because I like the idea that this thing is ephemeral and that you’re writing and re-writing and the idea of repeating which is part of the textile process and part of the language process as well.  It is fragile, but I’ve lived with some of these and as long as they’re not mishandled they hold up pretty well but they’re not meant to last for a long time.”

Fiber Philadelphia 2012 

Thread of Thought at Center for Emerging Visual Artists  through March 23rd.

Read more about FiberPhiladelphia2012 at Side Arts with Cassandra Hoo‘s excellent article.

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer, DoNArTNeWs Philadelphia Art News Blog

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