MONIKA MELER – PUSTKI

 

Monika Meler is from Poland. 

Monika Meler is a printmaker.

She is a woman.  An artist.  A wife.

A daughter.  A teacher.  A friend.

Pustki, in Polish, means something like a mixture of “void,” “absence,” and “lack” in English.

After her father died, Monika called to inquire after her mother’s well-being.  “It’s pustki everywhere,” she said.

Edmond Jabes has written that “Lack is the origin of the book.”

Like holes in memory.  Like puncture wounds, the scars.  Like ancient ruins, meaning-making, thought.  Like layered printmaking.  Like palimpsest.  Like love, grief.

What is gone or lost, effaced, erased, scratched-out or deceased never disappears but forms an absence, a layer of presence that bleeds into everything after.

The underside.  Foundations.  A blemish.  Once a slate, no “clean” slate occurs. 

Things are dropped along the way.  We recall…vague smells, faces flitting, a voice, a whistled tune.  The creaking of a swing in a park.  The ways pain affects our entries into futures.  The way bone heals.

Layers.  Layers.  Gaps.

Read Monika’s book like you would the rings of a tree.  A geological cross-section, an archaeological dig.  There are strata upon strata of shapes and impressions, printline over printline over stain, cut, affix.  Time. 

When something important is excised, we fill it.  The substitution never matches, not exactly.  The seams show.  The shadow is complicated.  We do not feel singularly.  Purity vanishes at our first exhalation.

I lost my heart, what is it I love with now?  That “same” heart? (albeit torn, ratcheted, scarred…layered, strengthened, filled..?)

Shape.  Ruined, rewritten, erased, written again, covered over.  Extracted.  Retold.

One never enters the same stream twice.

Turn it over.  Examine what’s underneath.  Hold it up to the light: what began it?  What is hidden in what is hidden in what is hidden?  Every seven years a new skin, not all at once, indecipherable.

“Lack is the vertigo of the book.”

“It’s pustki everywhere.”

To see more of Monika’s work, go to http://monikameler.com/.

Nathan Filbert – March 18, 2010

If I need it, I’ll make it.  If I can’t afford it, I’ll find it, salvage it, discover another way.  I need to be able to carry it on my back, or in a trailer, or…this van I’ve got!  It’s got to move, happen, be a process, dismantle/reassemble, flex on the way.

I’m here.  There’s this guy from Switzerland making vital paintings and carrying an electric drill loaded with permanent markers he uses to make tattoos…join me!  Impermanent permanence, now you see me…

I’m here.  I built a printing press of a bottle jack and whatever else I needed.  Set it up, lithograph, line drawing, language – watch it go!  Make!  Join!

I fashion old-style overhead projectors from cast-off computers and television sets, I create lenses for them, I project – you project!  Join me!

This is a “free country for free people” (so they say) with an infinite number of fees to be paid.  I can make a room out of this…come inside…watch yourself…see what self the culture shouts at you…think.  Join.

See that wall there?  What does it say?  What’s going on inside?  What if it said this?  Or this?  (projector ON).  What if the world, the whole world, were in 3-D and you were part of every picture, event and occurrence you see?  (Here – try these glasses!)  (projector ON).  Because you are…

Ever notice those lights?  I mean really notice?  Patterns, shape, hue, mood?  Here, let’s look at them closer, box them (build the boxes of course), and light them again…see them now?  Join me!

What can I make of this?  Why I could make a spaceship, an art gallery, a new universe, a workshop, a time-travel machine, a theater, an underground retreat.  A home.  A school.  A festivity.

Life is what we make of it…and I am unable to cease…the possibilities really might be…endless…

Find me.  I’m here.

I’m here.  Join me.

I’m here now.  Join me.

Find me.  I’m here.

(projector OFF…

masterpiece…

process…

an ephemeral graffiti.)

Find me.  Join me.

For more information about Joey’s work, and the Rose Gallery, please go to his myspace page, at http://www.myspace.com/therosegallery.



Nathan Filbert 03/11/10

Let us all be from somewhere.

Let us tell each other everything we can.

- Bob Hicok

Click here to view a short slide show of Sarah’s work

I was born a boy, small, tiny even, unknown to the world, unknown to myself. I am much bigger now, my body covered in dark hair, apparently busy and productive in the world: working, speaking, parenting, loving, hating, feeling, thinking.

How did I become this me I am still unsure of? Where did I come from? What is it to be a man? A woman? A boy? A girl? How should I behave? What makes me?

My father was not exactly absent, but he traveled a great deal and therefore was gone much of my youth. I was raised primarily by my mother and my older sister. In relationships I’ve been said to play “the woman’s role,” in friendship be “androgynous,” in behavior and motion “fluid” and “feminine.”

What did my childhood produce by learning the world through female eyes and emotions? Thoughts? Never a boy of many friends – where did I tumble and wrestle and fight without a brother?

Sarah was a girl among boys. Learning her body in the rough tangle of play. What to speak, how to say, voice of culture, voices of mother / father, the jangle of classmates and the yelps of boys, brothers.

I suspect an infant forms identity, as we always do, by what we are not. Tables and chairs and toys. Things we bump into, hide under, grasp and break or lose.

“Home” is this conglomeration, this sometimes upside-down world of objects and persons we are defined by, with, against. The smell of the space between, the sweat of boys, the kitchen, bathroom, sounds of shouts and tears, wooden floors.

This is the light we live by. Turning it this way and that, reassembling, amassing what becomes us. I am this, not this (my hand burning on the stove). I am this, not this (my body pinched and panicked in the fray of struggle). This, not this (speaking quietly or harshly to my doll, mounting the helmet on my head, wielding the sword).

Now there are streets and strangers, intimates and friends. Societies, armies, universes, ideas. I am this, not this (append an object). This, not this (don a mask).

Sarah Kephart has created great work of detail and mass. The subtle lines of our individuated personalities and the gigantic weights of our pasts. It is the light we see by, the burden we bend under or dispossess. Where we come from…who we are.

I am full of lies and truth and mute angry realities. The fragility of graphite, the gravity of oak and gluey white latex. The crush and flight of families, the subtle enormity of persons.

For more information about the artist, please see her website, at www.sarahkephart.com.



Nathan Filbert 3/5/2010