Iskra Fine Art

New Images About the Alaska Way Viaduct: Understory & Overstory

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I have just completed several of the final new images for the upcoming “Excavations” show at Zeitgeist. One portion of the show will be a series of 10″ x 10″ transfer prints devoted to the ongoing saga of the Alaska Way viaduct. The images are created from my photographs of the viaduct layered with painted and drawn surfaces made in response. This is a place filled with industrial strength beauty: loud, dirty, sometimes hazardous but always provoking.

I have been photographing the viaduct for at least 25 years, and this iconic structure is an enduring object of affliction. Many of the collages are based on recent cellphone photos taken from a moving car. This is the glimpse, the rapture of the vista, the overstory. But this one, the most recent piece, uses as its backdrop an analog photograph I took over 20 years ago when the train tunnel could still be seen. I stood for hours one long gilded afternoon waiting for trains, and documented the graffiti as it changed color in the refracted sunlight of the bay. Now that tunnel is invisible, walled in behind condominiums. This is the understory. As with all of the images in this series reality has been subtly collaged and reconstructed.

Banksy Was Not Here: Street Buddha Manifestation
Banksy Was Not Here: Street Buddha Manifestation, Transfer print, © Iskra Johnson
Understory 1
Understory 1, Saturday 1 PM, Transferprint, © Iskra Johnson

Meanwhile, although the cracks are getting larger we still drive. Best view of the sky anywhere:

Drive-By In Orange: The Viaduct
Drive-By In Orange, Transferprint, © Iskra Johnson

Each transfer print originates from the same image, but the transfer process creates a unique monoprint each time, with different surface qualities and subtle variations in color. I often make only one print of an image, but in some cases the variations possible are too interesting to pass up. This particular print has several variants, as I experimented with the grain of the ink and application of the transfer medium. In this version I “wiped” the paper as I would a zinc plate, to get the organic washed quality of the sky.

Mark your calendar for the opening, First Thursday April 3rd, 6-8 at Zeitgeist. A reminder will come closer to the date.

Driving While Dreaming, Two Studies of the Alaska Way Viaduct

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I am hard at work on my series of prints about the Alaska Way Viaduct. Big Bertha, our sensitive and emotionally overwrought digging machine is helping me out by quitting on the job. We may have several extra years to contemplate incipient ruin, the subtleties of patina and the beauty of going nowhere.

Enroute
Enroute. One of my favorite arrows.

This morning I started on a new collage with Pandora in the background set to my favorite station, which I am guilty, guilty, guilty of listening to instead of finding each song individually or listening to mixtapes made by friends 30+ years ago. The station, wouldn’t you know, is named for the father of music for airports Brian Eno. I do like this phrase from the Rolling Stone review of 1979, “...there’s a good deal of high craftsmanship here, but to find it, you’ve got to thwart the music’s intent by concentrating.” The trick of collage is often to concentrate while not concentrating, a sleight of hand through which something interesting may appear. Mr. Eno and his friends are the perfect soundtrack to encourage this state of mind.

As I was working, shifting layers back and forth and on and off and testing all the ways two simple images can converse and transform each other, I thought about driving and the visual emotional space of the car, which is so entirely married to music. I got my first and only car, a gray Toyota Corolla, in 1989. I will never take it for granted. The first time I sat on a lookout at sunset and turned on the radio I had a kind of American Satori experience: so this is what they were talking about! I get to sit here in my room on the street and just turn the dial and look out at the view?

The view of course is what the lovers of the viaduct will miss the most when it comes down. It is the last populist vista, where you don’t have to pay big dollars to see The Mountains and the Sound which make us want to live here. When it is gone we will have to buy a multi-million dollar penthouse condo or use binoculars to peer across the six to eight lanes of traffic they propose to go on top of the tunnel, which by then will cost 10 dollars per trip and which no one will use because who wants to drive in the dark?? Hmmm.

The music of this situation is both requiem and anthem, weaving its modal intervals in and out in lane changes and near-misses and ultimately onto the great offramp of what-it-is. Requiem for what is to be lost, anthem for what we can still see if we ditch our worries about gas and earthquakes and just go for a drive. I checked Pandora to see what lovely song was transporting me: “Ballad of Distances” from The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid, and “Requiem for a Dream” by the Kronos Quartet. Gotta love this many-splendored synchronistic modern life.

Ballad Of Distances 1
Ballad Of Distances 1, Transfer Print, 10″ x 10″, © Iskra Johnson
Ballad Of Distances Part 2
Ballad Of Distances Part 2, © Iskra Johnson

Stay tuned for details on my upcoming show, “Excavations,” at Zeitgeist, opening the first week of April.

Homage to Nabokov’s “Speak Memory”: Ex Libris 100 Books Exhibit, Seattle

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        “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between the eternities of darkness.”         

“Come with us by all means, but do not chase butterflies, child, it spoils the rhythm of the walk.” — Speak Memory, by Vladimir Nabokov

Speak Memory Nabokov Typographic Study
Typographic Study for “Speak Memory” © Iskra Johnson

When I was invited to participate in the exhibit “Ex Libris: 100 Artists, 100 Books” I had no question about which book I would choose to interpret. Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak Memory: An Autobiography Revisited has murmured in the back of my mind for twenty years as an unsolved koan. In my work as a book title designer I have designed a dozen hypothetical covers as portfolio exercises, and always I felt I could do another hundred without exhausting the timeless incantation of the words. I knew that this time I wanted to focus on shadow and light, the beauty of sensory experience and tactile surface. [Read more…]

Object Lessons: The Patra Passage

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“The word patra refers to the name of alms bowls that monks carry in various cultures to receive their portion for the day, an act that creates an understanding of interdependence with community and openness to the cycle of receiving and giving. The word’s origin in Sanskrit translates as “the vessel that never goes empty”. Whatever is received in the bowl is enough for the day, a reminder of the offerings of the present moment.” –The Patra Passage

Patra, Imagined © Iskra Johnson, charcoal dust and pigment on paper
Patra, Imagined © Iskra Johnson, charcoal dust and pigment on paper

You don’t see a vessel here. You must imagine it, as I did, leaving it in its box for the first month it came into my possession as part of the Patra Passage. I was honored to be part of the project.  I thought the vessel was very beautiful.  And yet I wanted to leave it in the dark for awhile, parked almost casually by the door, as though poised between coming and going. In fact, inherent in the Patra Passage is the idea of impermanence: yes, you take “possession” of this beautiful object for four months, but then you let it go and pass it on, and at the end of the year it will be sold and the proceeds contributed to charity. As much as I am someone who loves objects, and devotional objects in particular, I found myself resistant. I didn’t want to fall in love, and I didn’t want to give up an object of love. I would rather close my eyes in the morning and imagine it.

I would sit and start my meditation thinking of gold light, and the gold leaf within the bowl. I would run my fingers along the torn clay edge, and marvel at the indecipherable language placed flawlessly on its burnt arc. And then I would exhale and think about my email and how many dolphins had washed up on the shore of the Huffington Post and the sweater that had pilled after one washing and the annoyance of whether I should join the Cloud and why the milk kept going bad.  The usual non sequitur burden of having a mind that has a mind of its own and never wants to be truly empty. When I took the bowl out of its box and placed it where I sit each morning it made no difference. My attention was not on the bowl. I tried. I thought about generosity and giving and monks and alms and having and not-having and I concluded that I am selfish. I lived with that thought like a very annoying fly. It is still there, and I cannot say that I have become in any noticeable way more sainted.

What I carried with me from the very first moment of the project was not the vessel, but a sentence, rather not even a sentence, just the phrase: “enough for the day.” In those four simple words is a [Read more…]

“Breaking News: NSA Hacks Reynolds Wrap, Tinfoil Hat Will No Longer Will Protect You”

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Pandora
Pandora, charcoal dust and digital modification © Iskra Johnson

                  “Maybe stories are just data with a soul.” –Brené Brown

This Friday I went out to my neighborhood bar to celebrate the first week of the new year. I took my journal and my favorite pen and my phone, and sat next to another person dining solo. She had her phone propped up on her martini glass and never raised her eyes from it, even as she consumed her dinner and dessert and a second martini. I thought about how if she had a book at hand it would be the most natural thing in the world to ask her what she was reading, or to say, I’ve read that, it was great, even if I had no idea what the book was. And yet for a long time, though our elbows were four inches apart, I felt compelled to observe the mores of Seattle social etiquette: the closer you are to a stranger, the less you say.

Finally I could not resist my curiosity, and I asked if she was reading the news. This compelled her to raise her eyes and to list off her news feed, which included all the mainstream media plus “Mumbai, for some reason. My favorite is the BBC, I trust them.” I asked her if she ever read the indie news sources like Truthout or Common Dreams and she pursed her lips and shook her head.”I would never read something like that.” Conversation over. A few minutes later she raised her head again and reported, “Arkansas Lieutenant Governor accused of misconduct,” and went back to chewing her fries with aioli.

As the daughter of a newspaper publisher and a political activist, I will be the first to acknowledge an abject obsession with news, the worse the better. Trying to reconcile the big world and the little world, to parse the truth and find some meaning in making art in the middle of the apocalyptic mediafeed is a constant daily activity around here, which if you follow this blog you have read about before (sorry!). As part of my New Years resolutions I had vowed to be more mindful of what it does to my brain to allow the news in unfiltered, and to have perhaps a little more choice (hah!). On Friday as I browsed my phone in chastened silence and waited for dinner I came across a link on Facebook to Brené Brown’s brilliant Ted Talk about Vulnerability. Which of course made me think immediately about the NSA and the comment from our President after the first set of leaks to the effect that “perhaps some way would be found to work on encryption to make data safe.” Which was followed shortly by a new set of leaks about how yes, in fact the NSA was developing backdoor ways to un-encrypt private data to make it safe for the NSA to read our private mail at its leisure.

In other words, we are now all vulnerable all the time. According to Brené “Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change,” but I am not quite sure this is what she had in mind.

A few hops and skips led me to a truly outlier independent news source that mentioned casually that soon drones the size of fleas will be able to see into our homes and hear what we are saying. Sigh, there goes pillow talk. Pick the strangest science fiction you find, and soon we will be living in it. Really, I just want to go back to “normal.” I so wish we could shut the box of hysteria unleashed after 9.11 and confine eavesdropping to the secret lives of plants.

There is always a flower in Pandora’s box, and the key to smelling its scent is, yes, vulnerability. It is raining here in Seattle, and spring is soon to come. There are good things. And if anybody is listening in, that’s all you’re going to hear today. “There are good things, there are good things……..”

Flower Drawing
Origins of Spring, powdered pigment and graphite on paper © Iskra Johnson

 

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