“I’m not a symbolist. In other words, these are painting experiences. I don’t decide in advance that I am going to paint a definite experience, but in the act of painting, it becomes a genuine experience for me. It’s not symbolism any more than it’s calligraphy. I’m not painting bridge constructions, skyscrapers or laundry tickets….I don’t paint a given object – a figure or a table; I paint an organization that becomes a painting.”
— Franz Kline (1958)
The Imaginative Action Regime is an abstract organization that mixes absurdist humor with idealistic 1960s radicalism in the contemporary milieu. The Regime’s first big collective body of work, titled The Los Angeles Project, is a reaction to The Manhattan Project.
Ideally, if we can make something insanely destructive out of science, then surely we can also build something insanely productive out of art. Under this heading, we temporarily walk away from our computers, roll up our sleeves, and unearth dialogues with our hands. We sift through the rubble. We dig for a messy thought or hopeful thread that binds us with one another as human beings.
Aaron Eilers, Richard Froude, Jim Goar, Matthew Langley, Dan Chelotti, Grace Yukich, and Jonathan Yukich contribute handwritten letters, documents, and poems on the current condition and climate in America.
I use recycled materials, graphite, and acrylic paint on handmade wooden panels to visually translate these written documents and continue the conversation.
Collectively, we believe that critical analysis exists in the gut of you the viewer, in relation to something more primal, where the handwritten word stops and the painted line begins– that empty stomach between where we are now, and where we have been socially, historically, insecurely, even mundanely as everyday thinkers, dreamers, and builders. We are all in this together.
Collected below is an archive of my visual translations. Exhibited at Flying Object in 2013. All pieces are sold.
stacy elaine dacheux: project samplings 