implicit art

I have known Jessica Meuninck-Ganger for about ten years: as friend, colleague, someone I have written about (in my first book), and collaborator. She is smart, generous, detail-oriented, interesting, funny, sensitive, and… a bit manic (such is contemporary life). The work I am most familiar with is either deeply personal – presenting memory and dementia as they relate to facial expressions and materiality – and/or exploring a combination of form, space, and technique – installations, hybrid print-video projections and screens, and/or other mixed media projects that create potent story-based objects.

And so it was a pleasant surprise to read about Jessica’s latest approach to art-attunement: walking. According to her statement for The Alice Wilds, her Inbound East exhibition charts “the Milwaukee cityscape by departing east from 71st street and proceeding inbound toward Lake Michigan.” The artist walks, encounters, and takes photos, thinks, draws, and draws out, “overlooked aspects of the built environment,” chronicling:

matter, marks, indentations, and scratches. Hand-rendered textures of the metropolitan area include stacks of lumber, skillfully arranged patterns of cream city brick, fieldstone walls, composite fiberboard lap siding, rooftops, and cedar shake. She re-imagines, cuts, rearranges, constructs, and transforms her drawings into screen printed paper maps, buildings, landscapes, and waterways – providing distinctive views of a city.

Jessica tactfully, tactilely, and tactically… walks. And the tacit agreement between her and her landscape is that their story will continue, forever and together, even when they are not face-to-face (as it were). The city might at many points be invisible even while we roam it, but it is always felt. Its landscape is always moving – both itself, and the people within and around it.

Jessica represents that city with her work. But not in the standard sense of the word “represent.” According to French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, the “re” in “represent” is not repetitive; it is intensive. In other words, to “re-present” is not to present again, but to present more of what is. It is a presence presented. Meuninck-Ganger has us remember, facilitate, enhance, refine, re-image, reimagine, and reintroduce our selves and our relationships to and with the vibrant city around us.

Unlike the busyness of her day as mother, teacher, administrator, world-saver, community engagement actor, and more, Jessica must slow down and… look. She might spend an hour or more simply drawing a building while in front of it, like the one she is pictured with (two images up). Short and warm, giving character to everything around it, that building (she often names them after friends they remind her of) stands out as different, but belonging. … And after she makes an archetypal drawing of such a Milwaukee building – from a very real and specific Milwaukee building – she shows these “portraits” (above) of the buildings she “knows” – as in, she has admired or been inside that space, felt herself change because of it. No building is ever completely “known,” of course (nothing ever is), but Jessica has an intimate knowledge of what these do, what they think, how they feel. And we see and feel this in the ways we experience her crafted representations.

Or, Jessica might swish through a quick, one-minute sketch of an interesting tidbit – whether it be another building, a brick, or dripping water below a bridge… She might then revisit that drawing several days later, and re-present/re-draw that several times over, before turning it into a silk screen – representing the representation of a representation (etc) into one of her larger works.

More and more and more presences presented.

…

And you see, the East in Inbound East is not only about the direction of Meuninck-Ganger’s walks. It is also a reference to the influence of Eastern culture on her practice (as well as to Italo Calvino’s beautiful 1974 book, Invisible Cities, an inspiration for her). She uses Korean and/or Japanese-styled hand-made paper, inks, and cut-ups towards, for example, the production of pathway installations we are invited to traverse carefully, much like the artist traverses her city – looking for tactile details rather than a gridded whole. Above and below, Inbound East: Confluence is a two-wall installation of silk-screened and pasted-together prints that play between 2-, 3-, and 4-dimensions: flat, erected, and across time/space.

Michel de Certeau’s highly influential paper, “Walking in the City,” defines a tactic as an agile, material, and detail-oriented (tactile) approach to making change. It is opposed to a strategy, which takes a more institutional (structured) and less flexible approach, towards specific ends. Google Maps and city ordinances, strategic plans and road works: these strategically make futures without consideration for the everyday encounters we have with our own mappings within the city, their roads and where they take us. Whereas Jessica’s tactic for engagement is to walk and draw. And she represents the forces of what she finds in different modes. We continue to feel them in and around her show, even in their absence, and even after we’ve left the gallery.

Or with Inbound East: Coastline (very first image), the artist plays between the city as seen from above, the drawings she makes in town, and the space of the gallery itself. She paints the walls and backdrops the same water/sky blue to make it larger than us, but gives us a floor-based installation… and then reminds us just what an illusion these strategic views are, with the plastic plug holes in the gallery wall left overtly white, the blue-painted foam leaking onto the wood paneling of the floor from the dry wall. Here the plays between 2- and 3-D feel more tenuous, are disconcerting even while they are satisfying.

On Saturday May 19th, I joined the artist and about 20 others on a walk from the gallery, in and around Walker’s Point. She told us about her process of choosing buildings to draw, walking and forcing herself to pay attention to what is present, rather than what needs to be done. She even gave us artwork clipboards to “work” with. I got to know and see beauty in the sometimes invisible cities before me, in both large and small, known and unknown – with my three kids, some strangers, and some acquaintances I hadn’t spoken to much before.

It was… nice. It made me want to walk and think, play and draw… more. To spend more time concerning myself with the city and its inhabitants, concerning myself with… well, myself, and my relationships and environments.

And isn’t that what all art should do?

Jessica Meuninck-Ganger’s Inbound East is on view at The Alice Wilds in Walker’s Point, Milwaukee until June 16, 2018.