By
Bascove
Guest
Columnist
New
York, NY, USA
New York City has more than 2000 bridges
connecting and integrating its various neighborhoods and environs. In their
day, these engineering marvels represented to the rest of the world the
inventiveness and boldness of a young country. Even today, the sensation of
suspension, whether crossing over water or above land, of moving from one world
to another while hovering above, is both timeless and euphoric.
After decades of drawing, painting and making
prints of these magnificent bridges, I began to arrange and reconstruct my
research photographs differently. Reassembling the geometry and architectural
details of these structures, many I’ve come to know intimately, was a delight.
They instantly became new spaces to explore. Other obsessions – the moon, botany
and reading – that had previously been painted in a more realistic manner were
soon treated to this same investigation. As many of these pieces developed over
several months, personal influences and memories were often subtly included.
Mixed media is uniquely liberating for this pursuit. My
photographs and drawing are integrated with magazine and book scraps, cut
paper, internet printouts, thread and fabric. Fusing many passions – astronomy, engineering, poetry,
architecture and natural science –
they uncover the innate dynamism of growth and form.
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| Queensboro Bridge North to South |
Queensboro Bridge North to South was the first time I realized I
wanted some sense of movement to be felt with these reconstructions. The
photographs were taken walking from the uptown side of the bridge to the downtown
side. Working with several viewpoints, I thought of the overall picture as being
created from pieces, like a quilt, and cut up some geometric quilt
reproductions to make circles around the towers next to the bridge, their
geometry perfectly echoed the shapes in the bridge’s girders. The eight
sections are arranged from the top to the bottom of the bridge, north to south.
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| Outerbridge Crossing |
Outerbridge Crossing also plays with myriad views of a
bridge, the different elements repeat, forming a multitude of patterns, this
time turning into a spiral. The bridge’s architecture & the kinetic
experience of traveling on the road become integrated, generating a sense of
continual movement. Prints of the first sepia photographs of the bridge are
incorporated into a more contemporary experience. A quiet mug of coffee, a note
from the work of the studio, sits at the center of the vortex.
It was after reading Jerome Charyn’s two haunting books on
Emily Dickinson, The Secret Life of Emily
Dickinson and A Loaded Gun, that,
like many others, I revisited her work. In Emily
Wore White, her poem, A Spider Sewed
at Night, is interpreted in a very personal way. What had originally seemed
like a simple nine-line verse became a treatise on the life and labor of women
of her time.
Her identification with the spider who pulls the web out of
her body as Dickinson brought the lines of the poem out of hers, in private, at
night, is a most powerful image. That she also speaks of the hours of women
sewing, from collars to shrouds, covering the breadth of a life, reminded me of
the women in my own family who, at quiet moments were rarely without a needle
in their hands. It’s the first time I had sewn through the layers of paper, I
embedded some of my mother’s needles and thread in this piece. There are also
small reproductions dotted throughout in homage of two other notable female
arachnophiles, artist Louise Bourgeois and botanist Maria Sibylla Merian.
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| Eclipse in Black & White |
Eclipse in Black & White includes years of my drawings &
photographs of eclipses. The year I worked on this mixed media piece my lunar
photos were so monochromatic I experimented with a mostly black & white
palette. I added two drawings done from previous eclipses, paint and thread
color charts, and combined them with drawn black and white shapes inspired by a
favorite painting, The Jug on the Table, by
Liubov Povova.
There is a scrap of
memory; my childhood bedroom’s pink and starred ceiling, in Star Maps. It’s merged with starfish,
star-pattered fabrics, the Constellations of Grand Central Terminal’s ceiling
and images of the birth and deaths of stars from the NASA and ALMA
Observatories. Here color charts are the light spectrum; there are color bands
radiating out of the galaxies. The colors of stars tell astronomers their age
and the speed at which they are moving.
Hell Gate Bridge is the most recent piece included in
the exhibit. This was my first foray into video, it ended up being a wonderful
way to document and explain the process of gathering, choosing, adding and
subtracting materials and then drawing over them. It could not have been done
without the many hours of the brilliant videographer Shalom Gorewitz, who took
my chaotic photos and made them into something orderly and coherent, and Wendy
Blackstone, who generously let me use a short piece of her sublime music which,
as her music always does, adds depth and soul.
I want these compositions
to have movement, an energy that reflects the exhilaration felt while they were
growing and changing, seeing various elements joyfully finding new contexts,
and finally, building new exciting relationships between them.
(My thanks to Dr. Lynn L. Siebert, Director of The
Atrium Gallery, Morris Arts)
Link:
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Bascove’s
Exhibition: Celestial Symphonies &
Bridge Solos can be seen at the Atrium Gallery, Morris Arts, from September
27, 2018 – January 7, 2019 at the Morris County
Administration & Records Building, 10 Court Street, Morristown, New Jersey.