“No There There / No Hear Hear” by K.I.A. as installed a at Los Angeles art collector’s home. 84 x 60” Oilstick on industrial reflective tape on aluminum. (Part of the Transformer series.)
The work is transtemporal (like much of my work) -- there is a complex bas-relief texture of a Victorian petit point motto that reveals beneath the 21st century material. This work fuses the silver palimpsest series, and my linear mandala/DNA spectrogram/sliced collage approach.
The text reads "No Hear Hear, No There There", expanding on the Gertrude Stein quote about unreliable memory and perception of place, and emptiness, to include 'here/now' and not just 'then/there' ('Hear' aurally sounds as 'Here'). The mirror tape is utilized for another layer of the palimpsest, forming an abstracted digitalesque map of Oakland, GS's hometown. (Re: a map is not the territory, never is the actual place, just like memory...)
The reflective quality of the work allows the colors in the room, or the viewer, to resolve/dissolve into the piece. It also creates a shifting or unstable optical appearance as one moves around the work, with the different textures or sections luminescing at different angles or time of day.)
No set Time. No concrete Place. No set Meaning* -- interpretation of the phrase shifts when using a different sense -- one hears "Here" but sees "Hear", so the text can simultaneously be understood as "No praise, No comfort" (no encouraging claps of "hear, hear" from the crowd, no comforting pats of "there there" from Mom.)
*Final feint: the title of the work is actually "Here Her, There He"
