217.17 x 148.59 x 3.18 cm
Reveries of a Solitary Walker, the gallery’s second solo exhibition of New York-based artist Sheree Hovsepian.
Departing from traditional presentations of the photograph, Hovsepian blends studio and dark room techniques in a manner that confounds our usual expectations of image-making.
The Soulcraft of Many Small Gestures
By Allison Grant
Assistant Curator, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Columbia College Chicago
This exhibition is named after the title of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s unfinished last book, Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Written from 1776- 1778 and published posthumously, it extols the pleasures and sorrows of thinking and working in seclusion. In chapter two, Rousseau lays out a framework for his writing as a “faithful record of my solitary walks and of the reveries which fill them when I leave my head entirely free and let my ideas follow their bent without resistance or constraint. These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day during which I am fully myself and for myself, without diversion, without obstacle, andduring which I can truly claim to be what nature willed.” 1
Though created over 200 years later, the mysterious, monochromatic artworks of artist Sheree Hovsepian share a kindred sensibility. Using various mark-making techniques, Hovsepian shapes materials into unplanned compositions that are each unique and guided by the undulating patterns and graphic forms that emerge while working in the studio.
For Hovsepian, the studio is a space of contemplation and the repetitive gestures of the work move in tandem with her wandering thoughts, much as Rousseau’s mind wanders along with his footsteps. Adrift in process, Hovsepian feels that the most magical artworks leave her, “in awe of something that is out of my control.”2 In creation and display, the complex objects are intended to circumvent rational thought and open up forms of consciousness that lie beyond lucid reasoning.
Reciprocity of gesture, material, and abstract thinking occurs with particular harmony in Reveries of a Solitary Walker (2015), an artwork that shares its title with this exhibition. The background is a digitally-composited photograph of pinpricked black paper held up to a window.
The print reduces photographic space to a flat pattern and uses the medium’s most basic properties of light and dark to create a rippling static. On top of the image, graphite strips and strands of string run across the page. These pared-down lines are among the most elemental types of human mark making. Hand-cut photograms, strips of paper, ink, and oil stick are also included. Additionally, a piece of wood that the artist found in her studio and hand carved bisects the frame. Drained of color, the forms converse to mesmerizing optical effect, and at times appear celestial or reference the human figure. At other moments, they simply embody the serenity of pattern without reference point. The finished artwork undulates, never fully fixed as a surface, nor cast back into an illusionistic space. Rather, there is a constant interplay of physical and psychic negotiation.
Though Hovsepian foregrounds the experiential aspects of the artwork, her methods also intersect with her personal biography. Many of the works contain strings woven around brass nails. Wrapping the long strands evokes the artist’s childhood memories of knitting and crocheting with her mother. Like quilting and darning, these types of women’s work have historically straddled necessity and leisure. Attentive to this duality, Hovsepian reinterprets traditional feminine craft—and as she communes with hand gestures that have been passed through generations, she is mindful of the hours of disciplined labor as well as the ritualistic devotion that have long accompanied the process of weaving one long thread into a complex object.
The artist’s formal training in photography also influences the creation of the artworks. The medium may seem antithetical to her practice because it so often represents an instant, rather than the hours of absorbed contemplation that pass during the journey she navigates to arrive at the completed works. But by imaging methodically punctured paper and including photograms that almost drip with the movement of liquid chemistry, Hovsepian finds ways to exploit the unique and often overlooked capacity for photographic materials to poignantly express the movement of time and the accompanying fluctuations in perception that occur as one passes through world.
To this end, Hovsepian considers her practice as one that builds upon what photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s called The Decisive Moment. The term was coined in 1952 to describe the fraction of a second when a photographer is able to organize and freeze the moving world into a powerful composition. Hovsepian considers her work to be an accumulation of many decisive moments that collapse hours of reverie into a single, dynamic piece. Reflecting on the multifaceted complexity of human experience, Hovsepian unapologetically engages in the soulcraft of working with her hands, as she reminds us that it is in solitary moments that we often encounter the most profound dimensions of ourselves.
1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walks (New York: Oxford Press, 2011), 11.
2. Sheree Hovsepian in discussions with the author, October 2015.
