Molly Springfield: Palimpsest, Landscape, Catalogue

Molly Springfield provides a subtext to her show at Jet Artworks in the form of a quotation from Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Time Regained) [À la recherche du temps perdu (Le temps retrouvé)]:

Anything we have not had to decipher and to clarify by our own effort, anything that was clear before we came, does not belong to us. There belongs to us only what we extract from the obscurity within us. And since art reconstructs life exactly, around these truths that we have found in ourselves floats an atmosphere of poetry, the charm of a mystery which only the inner darkness we have traversed.

She offers as her own petite madeleine a series of personal texts, rendered in representational works spanning oil, photography, and graphite—media she uses, respectively, to mediate memory by way of palimpsest, landscape, and catalogue.

That’s the system Springfield uses to categorize the works in her show. It should be abundantly clear that she’s a cerebral artist. That makes the central juxtaposition in her show all the more emphatic: The object of her urbane considerations is a trove of her secondary school notes.

I’m willing to bet that “notes” don’t require any introduction. The ones I passed from about 7th to 10th grade document an expansive romantic tragicomedy, starring Amanda W_____ (first chair clarinet; captain of our Academic Decathlon team), Erica B____ (last chair oboe; first girl to visibly become a woman in junior high, and therefore the universe), and me, though there is significant debate as to whether either Amanda W____ or Erica B____ ever realized their prominent roles in Kriston C____’s life. I bet you have your own (surely less doomed) story. One of the properties of Springfield’s show is that as she works to universalize her own experience (by transforming her documents into artworks), the viewer is framing her art in the context of his own documents.

There are two series of paintings in the show: one, a four-painting series of phrases drawn from the afore-mentioned Proust quotation, the other, six paintings comprising the entire text of one of her notes. Springfield erases, blurs, and buries the text to arrive at artifacts that relate to the originals but are nonetheless ultimately obscured. Springfield works from a trompe l'oeil tradition, and her paintings tend to resist the Ed Ruscha, word-object-as-abstraction reading, tempting though it may be. She doesn’t render them to be (easily) read and emphasizes their formal qualities over their literal meaning, but she’s working with words nonetheless.

Molly Springfield, Please don't show this note to anyone, 2004. Oil on panel, 24" x 16"

These series recall the early Christian codices, e.g., the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (one of four manuscripts from which the Greek Orthodox Bible was compiled, the text of which was obscured by the meditations of St. Ephraem the Syrian). Springfield's palimpsests operate as restorations in reverse, in which one Molly Springfield (protagonist of her notes; Proust reader) is replaced by another (the historical author of the artifact; Proust annotator). The purpose is not, I think, to spark some self-reflexive circuit, but instead to force one text to engage another.

Molly Springfield, Please don't show this note to anyone, detail.

I read something in that dialogue. It seems to me that those notes as such provide a crystal clear illustration of Proust’s observations on experience. The subject of all that adolescent correspondence was the “obscurity within us”—assessing it, measuring it, defining its borders, clarifying and deciphering that constant feeling of urgency and by doing so, realizing our personalities. I think the experiences I personally documented were small (arguably, imagined), but that process of documenting everything laid a crucial framework for the real experiences that eventually came. More on the mysteries of adolescence, I’ll leave to a better poet.

Springfield’s photographic landscapes, presented in the exhibit as a slideshow, deviate from the tight discussion of her paintings. Before she had decided on a medium for this series, Springfield arranged a tableau of notes and figurines from a certain period of time. After photographing the landscape of the arrangement, she declined to do as she’d intended and paint or draw from the photographs. The slideshow offers one kind of memory (literal documents) in the form of another (imagery); chevrons and squares that mark these panoramas are distinguished by the different line weights and handwriting styles that cross these surfaces. The slideshow medium is appropriate for her work, but the apparently but not actually scattered quality of the landscapes seems to indicate an unintentional, or perhaps unexplored, comment on how memory works.

Molly Springfield, Untitled (memory landscapes) 2003. Digital video still.

Her graphite drawings are a strong return to form. The gridded, clinical presentation on the wall emphasizes the dark manifest of the show; scribbles, conversation snippets, and math equations, all categorized by date and time, are presented as autopsied and splayed for the viewer.

Molly Springfield, 06.05.03, 1:57 pm–07.13.04, 12:20 pm, 2004. Drawings installation view [from artist’s studio].

There are some interruptions in this catalogue—her decision to include drawings of objects (figurines, a cassette, a condom wrapper) strikes me as a mistake. Easily the notes, in their inaccessibility but familiarity, make for a potential that preconfigures all those things. (People at the opening hummed over the Admiral Ackbar drawing in particular, which made it seem like a distraction (if not a trap)—though the artist can’t be blamed for that.)

Molly Springfield, 5.31.04, 3:14 pm, 2004. Graphite on paper, 10" x 7"

Springfield's capable drafsmanship, the glue of the show, enables her to experiment in various media without the viewer ever finding the seams, as it were. She idles at points, but she doesn't waffle. And she's bound to idle at times while she's developing her thesis, but the artist who is willing to commit herself to a literary problem is the kind you ought to follow.

Posted by Kriston at March 29, 2005 4:17 PM