`liminal

Pulling Threads together /  by Justin Harrison

Different elements of drawings and thoughts. This is the least considered post which may be a good thing///

Horizontal and Vertical. 

Aggregate and liminal. 1 + 1 =3

Made and unmade

Undoing

Sunday was a day of attempting to consolidate some of the drawings I’ve been making.Somethimes I need to just quickly visualise some of my thoughts, even if it’s to dismiss them. I’ve been given some new ‘super black’ paint which I kinda like, it sits on the page so matt, but also fragments well into particals.

‘Immerse’ (forest project with Jon) hangs in the air frustrating me with its lack of flow. I want more but am unsure what it is/// I need to write more - more lyrical stuff. Somethings the words carry more of the idea.

I like my work best when there's a strong element of craft to it. Something Jon mentioned too>>> Drawn or made.

Drawings - direction maybe doesn't matter dead horses? Can I visit a slaughter house? Or animal crematory?

To do: Ink wash drawing of Revenant - Glass climbing inside horse 🐴 

Current artists of interest: Barney, De Brukyer, Boyce, Theaster Gates. Really need to widen my exploration. Must find more artists.

Are there films I should be researching into more? Taking stills and making drawings, looking for the threads of transforming places/moments?
Return to Joker? Saving private Ryan? Revenant? Other?

“making a destabilising passage through them”
Collins Jeff, Introducing Derrida P90

 

It's not funny /  by Justin Harrison

IMG_4664.jpg

I need to figure out why I like this image so much. Taken from Todd Philips ‘Joker’ this scene shows Arthur collapsed after being beaten by youths. He’s in the throws of pain and humiliation and incapacitation, laying prone in the middle of a side alley. Somehow the bright colours add to the jarring nature of the spectacle. The buildings and passage frame him in and out of darkness. I wonder if this could be described as a liminal place but one absent of a ‘master of ceremonies’ to lead him through, no ritualised pattern to follow and exit from a rite of passage. One that Arthur has to deliver himself out of transformed but not transcendent.

A joke, but it’s him, he’s the joke.

But he’s not funny.

The role of the Joker, in some cultures is the trickster, who by their nature stand on the threshold of the sacred and profane, the heyókȟa in Lakota Culture. Stood between the two worlds they exist between the lines.

Also Cayote in indigenous American stories, is a trickster straddling two worlds.

Liminal spaces in ‘rites of passage’ serve a constructive purpose. But when there is no rite to be led through and no leader, then there is decay.