Nancy Baker Cahill: Slipstream 17 (still) #2/5
Slipstream | 2021 Graphite, paper, hardware, software, electricity
“I want an invented truth.”
- Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
Slipstream fiction, trafficking in "the familiar strange or the strange familiar" via “epistemological and ontological questionings about reality,” [1] provides the conceptual framework for these mutated artworks. Evolutionarily speaking, each of us perceives our own distinct individual realities and are indelibly influenced by those shared with us. While invented truths are often deployed broadly for the purposes of oppression, disinformation campaigns and mass manipulation, this series embraces the ever-changing concept of truth itself. Each hybridized artwork in the series toys with and dwells in the murky territories of consciousness. Additive and subtractive in their construction, these transmutations embody a self-organizing logic.
Slipstream artworks begin as graphite drawings on paper, launching a long odyssey of production. The drawings are torn into pieces and then reconfigured in bespoke sculptural configurations. Echoing recombinant DNA, each sculptural installation represents an iterative version of the one before. Documented as 3D objects, they are altered, lit and animated using CG software. Once composited, they exist as discrete looped videos. A final step returns them to paper --forever altered-- as archival prints, in triptychs, which isolate sequential dramatic moments in their respective animations. These artworks gesture towards the organic, as simulated fictions of botanical forms. Each offers a familiar referent with no natural analogue.
