Figure/Ground/Rocks
A General Conversation with Jessica Zawadowicz
This piece is the first of many in what will ideally be a new text based revisiting of my series General Conversations in which I have a conversation with an artist about their work and their thoughts and produce something in its wake for them. I’m very excited to present the first of these in which I interviewed the artist Jessica Zawadowicz in her studio, amongst her work. We talked about rocks and sports and figure-ground and things and grammars and relationships. This work springs explicitly from this conversation while bringing my own thoughts to bear, not upon, but ideally with the work and ideas of the artist. I hope, as I hope with other entries into this series that it does justice to the artist as they are operating in the world, and entices you to enter into the conversation this artist provides us with through their work.
though we all know that nothing happens
only when it happens
Ross Gay, Be Holding: A Poem
“It’s not about sports,” is one of the first things Jessica Zawadowicz says as we begin discussing her work, an eclectic grouping of what I begrudgingly refer to as paintings to begin, if only because we must start somewhere. But like the use of the term painting, this first sentence is a bit of a mischaracterization, if not, at the very least, an instructive one. There is something in the discussion of another’s work a bit of what Leonard Cohen would refer to as the con. Zawadowicz might refer to it as the search for a logic, something she searches for in her own work, along with relationships, something she says she is always looking for. But I state this here self-consciously both because this is the first of this series and this question of writing about another’s work and practice is crucial to it, but also because there’s something of importance regarding relationships in Zawadowicz’s work. In particular this idea she brings up regarding grammar as it relates to various languages and their varying emphases on subjects. She uses the example in our conversation of “I have a car.” In English the I is the subject of this sentence, whereas in Russian the car is the subject, and this is a matter of how the sentences are structured grammatically. That sentence translated literally from Russian as opposed to approximately would be, she says, something like “the car is by me.” Its the container or the structure, and not the words, that changes. To quote her directly, “From your position you might see a scene in one way and relate to it strongly, or thinking about belief systems, I can have a belief and someone can be on the other side in the same room and have a whole other one. And at what point is one true and one untrue, its very slippery for me. And so I think it’s the slippage of, “you’re welcome” “youre in” “you’re not in” and it changes, I’m changing myself, I’m falling down, tripping over things, getting tripped up, is there and happening.” It becomes clear that there is something in that slippage, that refusal, that comes in relation, especially in contested relation that is of interest to Zawadowicz. This search for what I’ll call relational logics is at the center of her works. Specifically, I’d say, the moments in which these relational logics fail and refuse in their seemingly arbitrary positioning. Seemingly. But first let’s talk about sports.
There is in painting the idea of the figure/ground relationship. Specifically a way of understanding how the central figure of a work is organized in relation to the ground or background of the composition. However, it isn’t secluded to the realm of representational painting, but rather is a theory of vision put forward by gestalt psychology to describe how it is we differentiate between objects (in the most general sense) in the world. The core idea of gestalt psychology being that we take discrete elements in the world and bring them into a unified whole so as to make sense of the chaos that our brains must filter. Figure-ground is one form of grouping which allows us to simplify what we see so as to better understand it. This notion of the figure-ground is not only one of the first points of discussion in my conversation with Zawadowicz, but also what gets us to basketball. She talks about this figure-ground as something she is constantly thinking through as she creates her paintings—assemblages of paint, mark, rock, stick, sea water, dum-dums, popcorn, tortillas, spit, spoons, glass jars, and whatever else comes into her orbit (hence my contention that painting is a mischaracterization of her work)—but also something she thinks of as fundamental to our movement through the world, we are always figures on ground in a quite literal way. Why this becomes crucial in regard to sports, but basketball in particular, is the visual concatenation that occurs between figure and ground, body and court, and the relationship this has to a kind of rubbing up against physical laws of nature. Ross Gay’s descriptions of flight in regard to Dr. J’s amazing feat of athleticism in the 1980’s NBA championships in his book length poem, quoted above, is instructive here.
Having played basketball in college Zawadowicz has an intimate relationship to the game (another term of use here), which while it is again, not what the work is about, has this ability to open her work up in a way to get us where we’re going. That is how do we think the physicality of her works in ways that gets us to her interests in natural forces and the things in the world which are subject to them? Her works while seemingly static are always these bodies moving in space. Perhaps the better way to say this is that the objects in her works, including the substrates, are things always with the potential for movement, and in the failure of these discrete bodies to be, not only discrete, but to move, opens up tension. One work in particular holding on its surface an ankle brace, a physical representation of that moment when, getting tripped up, a body fails. Again, not quite there, for failure has implied and loaded meanings. This is failure transposed into the artwork to recognize the productivity of failure as it occurs in the world. Limits, figure-ground as the space in the work where contact and slippage occur. Small moments of tension occurring. Another work of her’s has a singular rock attached to a small canvas (though I want to say substrate, which we will return to) and has another rock balanced, staying still only through friction and gravity. One work of about the same size as this one is covered in rocks of various sizes, two small branches, a piece of bark, and a honey jar with a red substance in it dried so as to defy how gravity would have it pool normally. Of the rocks, the largest is on the top left, jutting outside of the bounds of its ground.
All of these works all the way down to some of the study’s in the studio amount towards what Zawadowicz referred to as a subjunctive grammar of painting that she works within. As opposed to understanding painting as a medium, for her its a language to work within. The notion of the subjunctive, a mood of verbs pointing towards the imagined, or the possible, spreads from this language of painting, onto the bodily languages at play in the work. Taking that figure-ground relationship I spoke of earlier in regard to our bodies and the world, and shifting them up and onto the wall, gets us towards these imagined tensions and slippages of Zawadowicz’s grammar. For it is, having elucidated the grammars she pulls from, very much a grammar she is crafting in a linguistically assemblagistic manner. This notion that languages determine not just how we say something, but how we can say it, is at the core of, borrowing the language of the Russian Formalist writer, Viktor Shklovsky, how she goes about making strange her works which pull from the mundanities of her surround, her ground. To say it in her words, its a way of getting lost to stay fresh.
The works of which I’ve been referring have been new, in the studio, some pulling things from past works to rework them into and onto these new ones. But what might be useful is to turn to a recent solo exhibition, from which this piece gets its title, to further dig into the subjunctive grammar, the relational logics of the work. Occurring this past spring at free range in Chicago, the work hovers at the edges of the space, as painting is wont to do, but with crucial moments of push. The two I want to begin with are works which perhaps demonstrate most tentatively the ways painting is for Zawadowicz a grammar not a medium. The first is a basketball perched precariously on top of the gallery wall—one which, with plastic and fabric curtains, forms a barrier to the rest of the space—which has adhered to it a piece of a painting and in a documentation photograph is being tossed in the air, presumably by the artist. Second is a small boot used to protect an ankle when injured, but still allowing movement of the wearer, upside down, and again with bits of painting adhered to it. But this idea of adhering isn’t quite right, rather it seems as if these “paintings” on the basketball and boot are stuck to them, as if an accident, or a fuck up, but in the generative way that love for failure would allow. The question of basketball and boot as substrate, which I can here return to, in order to establish why it is substrate seems right to me in Zawadowicz’s work. That is, if we think of it as the “surface or material on or from which an organism lives, grows, or obtains its nourishment” then there’s something of the figure growing out of the ground in her works. This reversal feels crucial, for it is not simply that the figure-ground is a relational logic for Zawadowicz, but that it is the grammar from which you can instigate those failures and slippages. The slip of the tongue, the trip of the ankle.
Then we can extend this onto the other works in the gallery. Of the three “paintings” two are quite large on stretched canvas, with another smaller work on a wood panel. Each work holds their own as equals in the space, with the smallest work seeming to have the most weight, because of the feeling of its rock’s precarity. The other two have much more going on—the first having only a handful of brown splotches to accompany it—with their large splashes of bold color, and the one which is a bit more sparse in the application holding a large branch which extends beyond its substrate’s intended bounds and a small grid of smaller stones, but here seemingly weightless (a few of these smaller stones even hold their own tiny paintings). What all have definitively in common, following the questions of substrate, action, and intention that come from the basketball and the boot, is that one wonders what came when. The figure-ground of one or the other becomes slippery. Demonstrated most intensely by the smaller work in which the rock feels to be more the substrate than the wood panel.
Zawadowicz’s works then speak to me of a subjunctive ecology, yearning to work with and against the very real forces that make up the physical world (to paraphrase Zawadowicz) that she crafts in these works and their relationship to each other, their making, and us, those unstable and unpredictable bodies which come into the space to be in turn invited and refused. She writes of her work that “the figure ground is the place for contact, a meeting place, or context for how we might experience our reality.” The question as that which allows for slippages of truths in this, a space built on a kind of trick room reversal of figure and ground, becomes that which allows collisions in the slip, the trip. The work stays still, and yet is itself constantly moving, like that split instance of Dr. J, mid-flight, ready to shift his body in ways all thought impossible, to refuse Landsberger’s refusal of his opportunity to shine. To bring it all in a kind of line: Zawadowicz’s assemblages act as subjunctive substances living within substrates, relationally, to build up these logics of grammar that ask us to come and play, “we all know nothing happens / only when it happens”.