Dana Caldera: Are These Portraits?
After years of working with found photographs, I found myself drawn to the memories one chooses to keep: correspondence, recipes, books, and notes, the personal records of a life lived. In this collection, these mementos are combined with abstract marks of mixed media, built up in layers over days and weeks. The details unfolded like a conversation as I worked, revealing themselves one layer at a time, much like getting to know someone. I hope that viewing the work feels like the same unraveling of a complex visual story, one that is at once familiar and strange.
Visual Vocabulary
As I worked, I found that a consistent visual vocabulary began to surface. The colors of the work are drawn from the delicate greys and ochres of the aged paper and the black and blue colors of ink, with some additional warming pinks, peaches, and oranges. The marks are controlled scribbles, made with conté or pastel, sometimes loose and other times confined to a shape or overlapping a piece of found paper. I’ve added some new textures to this work, embracing the unpredictability of acrylic ink pooled and left to dry flat, and the playful texture of the oil pastel scrawled on the raw paper, often creating negative space shapes.
Themes
Water, time, and tension emerged as important themes in this work. The use of water was essential to the handmade paper process (the first pieces I made when imagining this body of work) and the abstraction made with the pooled acrylic ink. Working with water in this way was unpredictable and brought the passage of time to the forefront of the work because I had to rest between layers as the water dried. There was an element of relinquishing control. Water represents strength, steadfastness, and cleansing. Over time, a little bit of water is a powerful force.
Time is ever-present. I’m creating new artwork using old material, the layering process of creating the work is time-intensive, and the art needs time to rest between each layer. This gives the artwork a chance to breathe and I get a chance to respond to how it forms. Time is a necessary component of working with the water and adhesives in layers.
As I worked, I was thinking about tension and balance. The construction of new artwork is born from the destruction of the old primary material. The build-up of texture and collage is balanced with the negative space of the simpler compositions. Other tensions present are delicate with playful, new with old, recognition with anonymity.
Questions
Are these timelines?
In a way they are, I’m creating the work from back to front, layering in collage material and mixed media as a new record of this time.
Are these portraits?
If I’m not using the likeness of a figure or a traditional face, can they still capture the humanness of a portrait? I’m working with found papers that evoke a poignant nostalgia, and I combine them sometimes haphazardly, mixing stories, mixing years.
Who’s story is this?
I’m both honoring the story of the original found object and reducing it to the basic formal elements of color, texture, shape, or line as with any other art media. This work is about all of us and none of us. A combination of abstract and playful mark making with distinct humanness and approachability because we see something of ourselves in the found collage material.
