Fri. Apr. 8: Introverted Excavator: New Work by Jennifer Nalbantyan
Introverted Excavator: New Work by Jennifer Nalbantyan
Opening: Friday April 8th, 6-10PM
Introverted Excavator is a series I developed out of my recalling various memories rooted in physical spaces. I juxtapose these memories and mental images with random bits of visual information from the outside world. As I began to piece together these memories with other visual cues, imbuing my own imagination onto them, I became interested in the curious ways that one’s subjective imagination shapes memory itself.
I began to think about the fragmented nature of memory and saw a symbolic relationship between the formation of memory and dreams. To piece together fragments of memory requires imagination, an activity that the mind does as it makes sense of pulses from the limbic system during the REM sequence. As dreams seem to mimic this process of collaging discrete elements of visual information in our brains, I similarly use fragments of random visual information from both the outside world and from my imagination in order to tell a story, blurring the line between fact and fiction.
As I was further developing the concepts behind this series, I decided that I wanted to boil these whimsical stories down to singular visual symbols as an analog to the mind’s need to simplify, reduce, and refine information. I considered the merits of screen printing and concluded that the methodical, reductive steps involved in making screen prints would mimic this activity. In that way, the loosely hung paintings are the freehand whimsical environments, while the prints are more schematically produced and compulsively repeated symbols.