Dennis Hollingsworth

The Only Trace Left is Ash

Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer wrote an accompanying text for the exhibition:

Paper Bombs

A drawing is like a leaflet and a paper bomb is like a paper lantern. A page of paper has its own indifference that equally accommodates images and letters, pictures and text. Paper is a flexible practice, a collagist activity and an activist?s exercise. A drawing, a pamphlet, a poster is thin and agile ? sliding through cracks, popping up with the breeze and dropping into view unexpectedly. It is portable, able to be folded or rolled up; slipped from hand to hand, person to person, into an envelop, across borders. It taps into something ancient, like papyrus and the deadsea scrolls, but like them it taps into the past?s absences and fragility, falling apart and crumbling over time. Paper is easily disposed of. If you burn the paper trail it goes up in smoke and the only trace left is ash.

A Paper Process, A Paper Practice puts art into its closest proximity with language:

Alphabetical
Book.
Broad, yet thin and
Brittle with age, pliable within a straight-edge geometry ? you can fold it across itself in
lines, not
Curves.
Corners.
Cut and combine. In a collage?
Copy
Chapters in a book.
Chance (cage, Cage)
Drawing; drawing up
Drafts, first, second, and final.
Empty, blank beginnings and
Erasures. Erasers.
Essays typed out on
Eight and a half by eleven sheets.
Face ? of a page, of a person, of an animal.
Flammable. In flames, like a burning bush
Falling from above into this place of your encounter with it.
Figure and
Ground,
(Gaps, gashes, and negative spaces).
Hand, palm, fingers ? thumb and index ? fist gripping a stick (of graphite/ink/chalk).
Hieroglyphs clutter a page, they may be recognizable as language or invented as a
language-yet-to-be-legible.
Homework done the night before, turned in, spelled out for the teacher.
Index, like Bochner?s inch and measurement tape.
Illusion, perhaps; allusion, for sure.
Images that are necessarily imaginary,
Incomplete, indecisive, incoherent, inconclusive.
Jews, we somehow agree, are people of the book, biblical critics.
Knife-like edge of a piece of paper, knife-like with speed.
Layers of stacked drawings add weight to what is usually so light, too light, almost
weightless.
Line extends into direction.
Language. Legibility.
Letters to the editor.
Lessons learned are lessons
Mimed.
Micro/Macro scales contained heterogeneously on one surface.
Manifesto posted outside, pinned on a door, glued on a stucco wall.
Magazines bought and sold for
Money, dollar bills and checks made out by and to me.
Naked.
Newspaper on newsprint and
Notebooks.
Outlines which organize.
Obsolete technology? Is paper being replaced the screen? By light?
Press: printing press, pruesspress, publishing, and pressure.
Parchment = skin.
Pens and pencils in hand working for a public audience.
Projection and perspective: photography was called by Henry Fox Talbot ?photogenic
drawing? and the camera was his ?The Pencil of Nature? at its start in 1844.
Packages sealed with a kiss, contained but ready to detonate.
Quit.
Reading and
Rambling.
School, where I pretended to drop out.
Silent, the mark stays visual ? visible or invisible ? leaving the soundtrack to be made by
the marking subject, the viewing subject.
Secretaries? material, equipment, trade, and stock.
Secretaries wearing pencil skirts. Sitting at their desks and sketching.
Soak it in water until the pulp disintegrates, making the mark truly fluid, dispersed in
your sink.
Slice and sever with scissors.
Tear and then tape it back together for a more intimate, DIY, real look.
Turning pages in a book, sheets of drawings over a table during which one feels the
Tooth of the paper, smooth to rough ? an
Unconscious texture, a universal experience and universal material felt privately and
about which Barthes would have something to say.
Underline form and text in one movement.
Underlining is like stripping a thing down to its underwear.
Verso (sometimes better than Recto).
Writing is
Work,
Xeroxing is also ? just ask Trudi.
Y
Z

UPDATE: Bart Exposito has a Flicker site with fotos from the show here.