A Look in the Mirror

MORE LOOPY LOONIES BY ANDREA SCRIMA

For the past ten years, Andrea Scrima has been working on a group of drawings entitled LOOPY LOONIES. The result is a visual vocabulary of splats, speech bubbles, animated letters, and other anthropomorphized figures that take contemporary comic and cartoon images and the violence imbedded in them as their point of departure. Against the backdrop of world political events of the past several years—war, pandemic, the ever-widening divisions in society—the drawings spell out words such as NO (an expression of dissent), EWWW (an expression of disgust), OWWW (an expression of pain), or EEEK (an expression of fear). The morally critical aspects of Scrima’s literary work take a new turn in her art and vice versa: a loss of words is countered first with visual and then with linguistic means. Out of this encounter, a series of texts ensue that explore topics such as the abuse of language, the difference between compassion and empathy, and the nature of moral contempt and disgust. 

Part I of this project can be seen and read HERE

Part II of this project can be seen and read HERE

Images from the exhibition LOOPY LOONIES at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, can be seen HERE

 
Andrea Scrima, LOOPY LOONIES. Series of drawings 35 x 35 each, graphite on paper; edition of postcards with text excerpts. Exhibition view: Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, June 2024.

7. EEEK

Michel de Montaigne’s famous statement—“The thing I fear most is fear”—remains, nearly five hundred years later, thoroughly modern. We think of fear as an illusion, a mental trap of some kind, and believe that conquering it is essential to our personal well-being. Yet in evolutionary terms, fear is an instinctive response grounded in empirical observation and experience. Like pain, its function is self-preservation: it alerts us to the threat of very real dangers, whether immediate or imminent.

Fear can also be experienced as an indistinct existential malaise, deriving from the knowledge that misfortune inevitably happens, that we will one day die, and that prior to our death we may enter a state so weak and vulnerable that we can no longer ward off pain and misery. We think of this more generalized fear as anxiety: we can’t shake the sense that bad things—the vagueness of which render them all the more frightening—are about to befall us. The world is an inherently insecure and precarious place; according to Thomas Hobbes, “there is no such thing as perpetual Tranquillity of mind, while we live here; because life it selfe is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Fear” (Leviathan, VI). Day by day, we are confronted with circumstances that justify a response involving some degree of entirely realistic and reasonable dread and apprehension, yet anxiety is classified as a psychological disorder requiring professional therapeutic treatment. Read more »

Monday, November 12, 2018

“How Do You Feel about Being an American?” A Conversation with Patricia Thornley

by Andrea Scrima

Indian Scout

From November 17, Patricia Thornley’s work The Western, part of her series THIS IS US, is on view as part of the group exhibition “Empathy” at Smack Mellon Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. The project is the latest in a seven-year series of installation and single-channel video works consisting of interviews and performances. Previous videos of the series are An American in Bavaria (2011), Don’t Cry for Me (2013), and Sang Real (2015). As a whole, THIS IS US  formulates multiple parallel inquiries into the collaborative fantasies Americans enact through popular media. In the current political climate, as the escalation of social and economic forces impacting millions of lives is cast into increasingly sharp relief, these fantasies take on new urgency and, in many cases, a new absurdity.

The Western’s cast of characters consists of these Civil War-era archetypes: Indian Scout, Beast of Burden, Frontiersman, Savage, Deserter, Justice, and Drifter. The work is conceived as a two-part installation in which the cinematic trope of the Western is used as a framework for inquiring into the American psyche. In the exhibition space, a projected “movie” is installed opposite a wall of screens playing a series of interviews with the seven participating characters.

Beast of Burden

Andrea Scrima: Patricia, a few years ago I conducted an interview with you about a previous work of yours, Sang Real (2015), for the online poetry magazine Lute & Drum. Now, with The Western, the overall structure of THIS IS US is coming more and more clearly into focus. The last time we spoke at length about your series was a year and a half before the last presidential election. How have recent changes on the political landscape affected your approach to the themes in your work?

Patricia Thornley: From the beginning in the THIS IS US series, one of the questions I asked in my interviews with the people who featured in the individual videos was “how do you feel about being an American?” Historically, there’s always been a certain political disconnect at play with Americans, due to less armed conflict on our own soil and a certain comfort level. Read more »