Response to R Justin Stewart
I think the piece that I ignored most during my initial visit to the exhibit, or put out of my mind the fastest, was R Justin Stewart’s self-portrait (October 7th- November 6th). His series of blue inkjet drawings is overshadowed in many ways by the spectacle of his piece bus structure 2am-2pm. However, the more I mull over this work, especially in terms of it being a self-portrait, the more intriguing I find this piece to be.
In the series, each blue page is a representation of a day within the time frame noted in the title. There are a total of thirty. The shade of blue varies to a greater or lesser extent, but always remains within the palette of blues that appear in the sky. On each page there is also small kind of discrepancy that takes the form of one or two thin, white, pixilated, jagged lines. Sometimes the lines spread out, other times they cross each other. They seem like a flicker of lightening amidst a huge blue back drop.
Something that expresses the self (of the artist) is contained in every page using some variation of shade and line pattern. It is a representation of the artist’s self on a given day within the framework of these two qualities. The pages by themselves could not show much about the individual, but the placement of them in a line creates a month-long timeline that gives a sense of movement and change. For example, a couple of the pages seem to have matching shades of blue signifying a consistency in the self from one day to the next; but then the third day ruptures this with a deeper shade of blue showing a greater change in the individual. The fourth day returns to shade of blue from the first two days (October 14th-17th). There is a shade of blue that appears more often than the others, and it has a greater likelihood of being repeated for two or three days at a time. This might mean a couple of things: it may be a sense of normalcy within the self broken up by deviated days, or it could be a dullness of the self broken up by days of more interest. What ever the case may be, the choice to use blue to represent the self is interesting. To me, blues that exist in the color palette used by the artist have an inspirational quality. Since they remind me of the sky, the overall effect is both mythical and optimistic.
The white lines can be interpreted in a million different ways. From my viewpoint, the lines reminded me of a figure diving through the sky. The patterns of the line signified something different about the degrees of openness, grace, awkwardness, fear, etc., of moving through the space we live in.
The viewer can walk past the piece from left to right to see the progression, they can walk from right to left as if moving backward in time, or they can back away from the piece and see the continuum of time all at once. In this last option, the viewer can almost break into a different dimension in which time exists not just a fixed point but in all points at the same time. I kind of like this thought because it alludes to greater possibilities of life beyond what we know as the third dimension.