Alisa Rodny
July 2010
Artist Statement
In the story the Nutcracker, which is not at all a fluffy ballet people know it as, but a very dark and scary book, in which there is no such thing as a Sugar Plum Fairy (though one could argue that the Sugar Plum Fairy is as dark and scary as it gets), a book written by a German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann in 1816, and originally titled The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, a book in the beginning of which, a young brother and sister (Fritz and Clara (and not at all Marie, as so many people seem to think)) are presented at Christmas Eve with a wondrous gift made by their godfather named Drosselmeyer. The gift, a version of which the children receive every Christmas, is a magical moving castle with a clock mechanism that can be wound and all people inside made to move, dance, twirl and sparkle.
This type of toy was typical as a form of entertainment for both children and adults of the European upper classes of the 18th and 19th centuries. When in-home entertainment was starting to be a possibility for a select few other than the king, seemingly magical mechanisms created by clockmakers and other artisans brought a kind of wonder, amazement and joy into people’s lives they had not experienced prior to this time. Various mechanisms that ran those toys and devices affected people’s imaginations, as well as their notions of where magic ends and reality begins. This is very noticeable in the music and literature of those centuries, in which toys come alive, and mythical creatures are animated through various means other that spirits and angels.
My source of creative inspiration comes directly from that time. While I enjoy, delight in, and appreciate modern technology and all the things I understand as being “of the future’ it makes possible, I do not connect it to the divine spark of inspiration which fuels my creative process and motivates me to make the things that I make, and learn how to make them better and more interesting. I believe that real magic, the kind of magic that enters deep into our imaginations, and makes us see the world differently, has to be made by hand, deliberately, painfully, often times sacrificially. The image of a lone watchmaker sitting at his desk and manipulating tiny springs, gears and crystals is one in which I (unwillingly) often see myself.
While I do not make watch mechanisms, I am nevertheless interested in making art in which each part is exact, deliberate, and intricately connected to the parts adjacent and surrounding it, and the entire image (mechanism) as a whole. In my paintings, each large piece of paper is filled with small parts all of which depend on each other. When I paint them, I almost anticipate that the images might become animated and start moving on the page. The same can be said about my recent 3-D work. I want to combine two and three -dimensional images that fit together, force the viewer to question (or simply appreciate) my choices of juxtaposing different ideas symbolically or realistically represented, and my attempt to make a visual narrative, which the viewer is free to read in many different ways.
With my Peep-Show Boxes, I am also going back in history, to a time when people lived in the same places their whole lives – and while hearing stories of such things as an ocean and mountains – never seeing them; paintings of such things were secluded in castles and palaces, and travel was not a possibility. Traveling actors and musicians began including peep-show boxes in their repertoires – and for a small price, peasants all over Europe could see a part of the world (or, more accurately, an artists representation of a part of the world, or exotic plants, or mysterious olifaunts) that they would never see otherwise. The magical aspect of the peep-show box was not just that they could see it, but the peephole detail made the viewing a very intimate experience. While the viewer could not actually go to the place they were looking at, the act of peeping separated them from the people around them, and from their immediate environment, and forced them to focus on the experience, which, I would argue, added a magical dimension of a feeling of “having been there” that art on paper could not accomplish on it’s own.
I am interested in creating that sort of an experience for my viewers. I want my pee-show boxes to be self-contained magical world that tell a story, transport a person to a different place, allows them to be alone, even if surrounded by others. Two works of art that I constantly reference in my own mind while working on the boxes, are Alice in Wonderland’s garden that she is too large to get in to, and Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnes, where only a small piece of the whole image is visible, intriguing, disturbing, familiar and also strange. I want there to be a certain feeling of wanting to get inside, but not being able to, and never seeing enough to know the whole story of what is happening inside. I believe that a viewer carries such an experience for a long time after “peeping” inside, and the story that starts to form lives and grows for a long time, even after the viewer is away from the piece.
