The Charlotte Street Visual Artist Award Exhibition 2018 is about to wrap up and I'm currently reflecting on the incredible experience. Jennifer Baker, the curator of this years exhibition at HR Artspace recently completed the essay "Precipitating Time", with her own reflections on the work in this show by myself, Marie McInerny, and Jarrett Mellenbruch. Here is the excerpt of the essay about my work in the show:
"There is a palpable quality of stillness in the thirty minutes before rainfall: a suspension of atmospheric breath presaging an impending tearful confession, the calm before the storm. Eventually, this stillness is interrupted by slow winds rolling across a landscape, bringing with them the scent we’ve come to recognize as something soon torrential. The fresh, crisp smell is the aroma of ozone, a word that derives from the ancient Greek meaning, “to smell.” The pale blue gas is carried by downdrafts from the stratosphere to the troposphere where it reaches our noses. Unlike our senses of vision, hearing, touch, or taste, smell is not relayed through our brain’s thalamus—instead it travels through the olfactory bulb, which is directly connected to the amygdala and hippocampus. These are the areas of our brain that also process memory and emotion, and this biological pathway might explain why scent so easily triggers such intense and sometimes unexpected episodes of nostalgia. Jillian Youngbird grew up in Hartville, a town deep in the Missouri Ozarks that averages 45 inches of rainfall per year. In a humble house with three generations of women and no men, Youngbird quickly learned how to make things out of necessity, cultivating a determined work ethic and a creative curiosity toward material possibilities. Honing the handiwork skills taught by her grandmother and incorporating the natural and domestic landscapes that surrounded her in those formative years, Youngbird has infused her artwork with the aesthetics of the Ozarks using appropriated images, practical “make-do” sensibilities, and the idioms and dialect of the region. Altered photographic images often appear in Youngbird’s work, recently as images of frontiersmen and the “wild west” into which the artist introduces humor using text or playful material interruptions. In the work created for this exhibition, she continues to engage the photographic image, focusing on a more theoretical investigation of the medium and its capacity to capture the fleeting nature of remembrance. Back in the Wild Blue Yonder and Blue Are the Hills that Are Far Away are sculptural wall installations reminiscent of interior windows dressed in curtains. The latter features a photograph of the artist’s maternal grandmother re-photographed, processed as cyanotype prints, and organized into two planes—one as a grid of nine rectangular segments in thin gilt frames that hang on the wall, and the other printed in the same grid format, but onto one continuous and transparent piece of cloth that hangs several inches from the wall, undulating freely with the currents in the air. At times the two identical images line up to create a whole and readable picture, but these moments are fleeting as the gallery’s airflow activates the nearly weightless cloth. The image displaces and realigns itself before our eyes in a mesmerizing choreography with the interior atmosphere. This rhythm of displacement in space amplifies that the image has already been remediated twice—first through the process of digitally photographing the original film photograph (one can see the artist’s hand holding the original photograph in this secondary image) and again during the photographic cyanotype processing. The distance this chain of image displacement and remediation creates, the constructed illusion of looking out a window into an imaginary space, and the brooding blue of the cyanotype print effects a striking visual interpretation of melancholic longing —a grief that can only come from an unnamed or unknown loss, one that cannot be fully comprehended or articulated. The brassy gold of Youngbird’s frames and metal hardware in these works shows up in other pieces as meticulous beadwork in My Cup Runneth Over and in the hand-pieced fabric work of The Daughter Sure Favors the Mother. In the latter work, Youngbird has digitally printed another photographic portrait of her grandmother onto fabric, cut it to pieces, and sewn a diptych of the image together with pieces from a golden table runner. The result creates the effect of a mirror image, though the abstraction of the grid-like deconstruction makes it difficult to register the portrait. Through the tessellated disruption, what becomes more striking is the seeping turquoise stain that appears to emanate from the negative space between the two framed images. This painterly blue-green feature is taken directly from the original photograph, which has been damaged by an unknown agent, obscuring a portion of the original photograph and threatening to continue to break down the chemical elements that display an image of the artist’s beloved kin, destroying its legibility completely. By allowing gilt surfaces to punctuate the portrait and further wounding the wholeness of the original image, Youngbird has translated the photographic punctum as something tactile and glittering. Her material interpretation is born from a dear memory of a game her grandmother invented for her to play when she was a young girl: pretending to be a prospector searching for “gold,” which was actually common rocks her grandmother had spray-painted and hidden in the yard. The “gold” in Youngbird’s work (spray-painted plastic or cheap synthetic fabric) demonstrates a preciousness dependent on sentimentality rather than monetary pricelessness, kitch rather than glitz. The treatment of material is an abstract retelling of her personal narrative, creating a reverent mosaic that reflects the artist’s longing for a remembered thing. Both her great-grandfather and her mother appear alongside her grandmother in this body of work, revealing three generations of storytelling through a combination of photographic processes and material manipulation. Billowing folds of fabric, enigmatic shadows, jewel-toned erasures, auric interruptions, and windows to a blue-grey weather of remembrance fully animate photographic images of the artist’s own history, creating a body of work that gazes back in time while situating itself in the present as a group of moving image"