MARISSA KLEE-PEREGON

I want to ask the wall to tell me about its past.

 

I want to listen closely to how it tells me -- through physical evidence of its changes over time -- bricked-up windows, patched-up drywall, painted-over graffiti. Patches of darker paint where something once hung.

 

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Wall One was installed on the third floor of the Park Trades Center, an industrial-building-turned-artists-space in Kalamazoo, MI. It cites a bricked-up window on the first floor of that same building -- on the inside, near the loading dock, in a hallway of many other bricked-up windows and painted-over bricks. The work is comprised of three parts: an impression of the wall in question, created by pressing wet paper against the wall until it takes up its texture and dries there; a to-scale graphite drawing of the wall, surrounding and contextualizing the impression; and, finally, the performative process of erasing the drawing, leaving the gallery wall blank once again.

 

I am interested in representing and re-presenting the wall by the loading dock -- and yet in marrying that wall to the studio wall. The two walls overlapping and merging, doubling up. The graphite representing the surface of the absent wall, yet catching on the bumps and striations of the present one, indicating its surface too. My hope is that, for a moment, the one wall will become two -- a double sort of doubleness, culminating in a space (an image?) which is at once an index and an icon; at once a wall and a representation of a wall; at once the support for an art object and the object itself. And at once, I hope, absent and present.

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