Hmmm / by Heather Kapplow

Detail of Hermeneutic Cycle: Three Phases (Phase II)

Detail of Hermeneutic Cycle: Three Phases (Phase II)

Some of the pieces I make never make it onto "pages" on this website, and often don't get really documented either, so I try to write about them in here.

I've got a piece (Hermeneutic Cycle: Three Phases) in a show that closes this upcoming weekend that falls into this category. It's small, simple, emotional, and involved some soul searching. I think it was also a failure in many ways.

It's just a collection of stuff, with a narrative (that only a jury saw) to tie it together. It also had a series of actions, but none of them happened the way that they were supposed to. Which is okay.

Here is the main lesson I learned, as expressed in an email about logistics addressed to gallery staff:

"This experience is a good reminder that honoring intention sometimes has to trump aesthetic desire in a conceptual work."

Detail of Hermeneutic Cycle: Three Phases (Phase II)

Detail of Hermeneutic Cycle: Three Phases (Phase II)

That said, the psychicor psychologicalstuff of this piece that I was going for never really emerged completely either, so I'm not even sure it worked on the deepest conceptual levels, despite my best efforts to create and follow formulas that I hoped would force these dimensions to the surface.

And it was a bit anti-climatic on the pragmatic level as well, in that it would have or should have culminated in some explanation on a panel discussion, but the panel got reconfigured so it won't be covered now.

It's possible that the theme of the piece was just too heavy and sad to achieve any buoyancy. Or maybe it was just a private piece that I made for myself that just happened to happen in a public space. And if that's the case, it hasn't yet satisfied my needs, but maybe something miraculous will happen in these last few days...

Detail of Hermeneutic Cycle: Three Phases (Phase III)

Detail of Hermeneutic Cycle: Three Phases (Phase III)

In any case, up next: another small, simple piece. Hopefully not too simple, and ideally a little more successful, but who knows what will happen. Maybe it's a symptom of this new era that everything creative feels just slightly flat. We'll see. But I'll make time to write about that project soon after it happens (mid-March) rather than waiting another month or two to write here.

Other than that, I've made a lot of proposals that aren't being realized, and am gearing up to begin my first 2017 residency in about a month, which I will also talk more about next time.