a still-life picture

text

shadow

The body is the subject of shadow --- and its shadowy seeing is also, already, the imprint, the reminder of the light, the sign of solar vision.

Corpus Jean-Luc Nancy

Domestic Nature

Seems, it is very reasonable to draw a tree next to a house, when one wants to make a landscape picture. However, I never make them together.

Seems, it is very comfortable to draw a flower jar on a table (maybe, against a window or wall), when one wants to make a still-life picture. However, these elements have never met.

Nature for me, is a non-native language. Maybe, we can never speak its language and there is not even a way to learn. Nature has no body. Then, when during the past 2 years, I went back and forth from Nature to the cities, I was not be able to find completed vocabularies to 'talk about' it. Nature does not guarantee an experience.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty once suggested,"Nature is what has a meaning, without this meaning being posited by thought: it is the autoproduction of a meaning. Nature is thus different from a simple thing. It has an interior, is determined from within; ...nature is different from man: it is not instituted by him and is opposed to custom, to discourse."

Perhaps what I am showing in this exhibition is like the line, from Lautreamont, in the Surrealist Manifesto: "the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella." My drawings - a stool meets a tree, bodies without head meet the text (those texts I saw on some USA road trips), a lamp meets another tree - show all these encounters, though eventually they are not actual experiences. They are only an imaginary afternoon, when I take a short walk in the woods, may be or may not be getting lost, thinking back and forth -- depart home or return home.

Domestic Nature
drawings on wood and paper
work by Ivy Ma

Jean Brandt Gallery / Cleveland

Opening Reception
ArtWalk Friday May 8 / 6 -10 p.m.