Margaret Rose Vendryes
Unmade A, 2010-2021. Gesso and paper on canvas. 28 x 18 1/4 inches.
Unmade B, 2010-2021. Gesso and paper on canvas. 28 x 18 1/4 inches.
Unmade C, 2010 – 2021. Variable dimensions. Mixed media. NFS
Unmade 1 thru 8, 2021. Digital pigment print, etched acrylic, painted wood frame. 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 inches.
Unmade San Diego, 2021. Digital pigment print, etched acrylic, painted wood frame. NFS. 19 5/8 x 19 5/8 inches.
Shredded, 2021. Digital collage on acrylic. 30 x 30 inches.
WHILE… I, 2021. Painted wood shadow box, machine shredded handwritten letters, painted wood letter “I.” 11 ½ x 13 ½ x 3 ½ inches.
BECAUSE… I, 2021. Painted wood shadow box, machine shredded handwritten letters, painted wood letter “I.” 11 ½ x 13 ½ x 3 ½ inches.
I KNOW, 2021. Painted wood shadow box, machine shredded handwritten letters, painted wood letter “I.” 11 ½ x 13 ½ x 3 ½ inches.
DESCRIPTION
In this new body of work, the artist engages monochromatically with photography, text, and installation to consider the personal archive, the tension between abstraction and representation, and the intimacies of relationships. The white sheets of UNMADE recall the Untitled billboard by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1991) or Lorna Simpson’s The Bed (1995), wrinkles becoming landscapes with their hand-torn edges pushing back against the rectangularity of the frame. The artist’s stream-of-consciousness reflections are etched in neat script over these photographs, inviting the viewer to spend time up close.
The deep shadow boxes each contain a bold, black capital “I” among scraps of letters, many shredded folded like flower petals, or eyelids. On their side, bits of phrases ask to be put in relationship with that singular pronoun, ellipsis suggesting waiting or a crop of a sentence, much like the fragments of language inside. Vendryes asks what is, or can be, read, and how record-keeping relates to memory. “We rarely remember anything correctly—which is okay,” the artist tells me over Zoom. Indeed, it’s only because of my own (messy) script notes I can cite the conversation. What does it mean to transform an intimate archive of words gifted into something else, something of a different shape, something public, something less legible and yet containing new language?
“Unmade hotel beds record more than the bodies that left them unmade. Dreams, dreamless sleep, lovemaking, fucking, tears, laughter through tears all resonate in folds and stains soon to be removed. Unmade is a visual record of my beds away from home captured and then destroyed – permanently UNMADE. The archived letters, which document the sentiments of spouses long distanced in my mind, were fed to the machine. Photographed, torn, scripted, and shredded, I have silenced and contained memories that can no longer haunt me. My re collected thoughts about the unchangeable past are memento mori of unfulfilled happily forever afters.” - Vendryes
BIO
Margaret Rose Vendryes is an art historian, visual artist, and curator. She received her BA in fine arts from Amherst College, MA in art history from Tulane University, and Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University. She is a Professor of art history at York College, City University of New York where she is Chair of the Performing and Fine Arts Department and Director of the Fine Arts Gallery. Vendryes is the author of Barthé, A Life in Sculpture, a comprehensive monograph on the late African-American figurative sculptor Richmond Barthé. The African Diva Project paintings have had solo exhibitions and appeared in several group shows over the last decade. Her studio practice is centered on the human body, its costuming and performances, in popular media and in private moments.