TEXT Projected, Jenny Holzer

San Diego, Projection, Jenny Holzer LAST NIGHT: I  watched on Netflix an interesting documentary about conceptual text artist Jenny Holzer “About Jenny Holzer; Protect me from what I want”. She works (ed) with “truisms,” short statements from various perspectives that she may or may not personally agree with, but that are concise restatements of what she thinks is “in the air” in our Western culture. More about Jenny here.

Here use of text, messages and meaning is striking and ephermeral, the material is often projected LIGHT; her space, the architecture or natural environment. I highly reccommend the documentary.

Holzer's work made me open to looking for a "truism" in the text collages I had made recently as part of demos for teaching a Joggles on-line course. It was about finding a message that already existed in the text work that I had done, a kind of unconscious writing come to consciousness.

Here's the raw material: (text collages printed on fabric, erser stamps, paper cloth text collages, etc.)

And here's the process toward Art Quilt Complete:

I found: “Unseen messages never settle.” The cut letters are from fabric that was a direct print of a collage (now deconstructed into individual letters). a print of red “S”s from an eraser print and “NEVER SETTLE” from a paper cloth collage.