Gretchen Batcheller
The city captivates me. This appeal stems from a deep-rooted interest in the relationship between structure and place, rational and irregular. Sometimes these interactions are simplified and harmonious, and at others, they are chaotic and dissonant. My work serves as an interpretation of urbana as it becomes a visual correlate for reality. Born out of observation and memory, it is a catalog of experiences spent within a fractured and glorious city. It is a personal reflection of the individual – me – born out of a deeply held desire to reflect and actively interpret location.
This past year I have been working with the rich visual texture of Philadelphia, and have discovered a duality in my response to this city. I feel a sense of belonging in community, yet I am Other; I am drawn in and repulsed all at once. It is a city that fluctuates between layers of growth, depression, and renewal. I have both a healthy respect for and fear of these layers and the manner in which they manifest community. It is not primarily a sense of curiosity that keeps me looking, but the hope of finding a context for understanding the city and myself in it. Urbana challenges my ability to find an appropriate expression for its seemingly endless layers.
Similarly, I am interested in the inability of paint to adequately communicate this interpretation of place. Martha Rosler’s work points to the ineffectiveness of medium (in her case photo and text) in The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems (1975). She questions the very systems of representation with which she operates. It is a mediation that is fundamentally flawed and distorted. The efficacy of a single image is not enough. The symbolic totality it provides is inadequate and multiplicity becomes paramount. For me, painting also becomes an inadequate medium – it never fully embodies or interprets the experience of the city. My paintings are visual links to experience – experience that oscillates between seeing something, and the sensation of that something. The responses are infinite. A singular stabilized image becomes destabilized through seriality and becomes archival. In this manner I am able to communicate in paint a multitude of impressions and experiences to the viewer, as opposed to a sweeping verticality of a singular metaphor.
Bruce Ferguson writes in Exhibition Rhetoric that moments of communication are primarily acts of persuasion and are always open to further change and value constructions by the viewer. We can choose to passively consume images that move past our eyes or we can accept the challenge to work a little harder. It is my goal that my work provides the incentive for the viewer to remain and actively interpret what they are seeing and experiencing. Communication should not always be immediate, understandable, or easy. Rather, it should allow for moments to be provocative and create dialogue and reciprocity. The importance of that dialogue rests on encouraging recognition of the city in its various social, political, and sometimes fantastic facets and layers. It is a dialogue about our very way of seeing and representing the city, and the necessity of complicating that vision.
