Week 6 Reading - In the Making: Implicit Meanings - Metaphor and Symbol - Michal Rovner (pp. 44-51)

Similarly to Rovner, I think I'm somewhat interested in different media of display in association with the same subject matter.  For example, so far, my textile work and portraits have evolved into more and more material forms; the very first work was digital, then drawings, then paintings, and next I plan on these sort of quilted fabric collage objects, and ideally, I would like for them to all be seen together. Rovner, however, does this in order to communicate chaos, and to relay onto her viewers a sense of disorientation, confusion, and dizziness that she herself may have experienced earlier in her life.  Had I had something happen in my life that had been that devastating, fearful, or chaotic, I might be interested in sharing this experience, but generally I am personally uncomfortable with intentionally causing my viewers to feel this way.  I am more interested in mystery.
However, while communicating a given feeling, Rovner still likes to be loose-ended enough that viewers could take away several different interpretations of her work, and although my work right now is not so abstract that it could mean so many things, I acknowledge that these characters I've created can be dynamic, and that the idea I have of who each of these characters is might be very different to each person who sees them.  In that, the currently limited identities of these mysterious women will expand into many different identities through the viewer.  Maybe.  I would like to somehow encourage my viewers to treat each piece as a story, to interpret and to become writers of fiction temporarily while viewing my work, beyond just showing the pieces.

In the first instance, the viewer's response is automatic and reactive.  In the second instance, the viewer's response involves the application of imagination and intelligence.  Yet neither response is sufficient to account for the representational complexity of this work of art.  Rovner explains, "I am trying to shift the thing away from its identity, away from its locality, to watch it in many ways, to look for some kind of essence."  This essence is located in the human collective unconscious, a remove territory that may be difficult for people to access.

This hierarchy of reactions may be true, to an extent, of any art piece.  A gut reaction or an initial unexplained attraction or aversion to one piece over another, then a pause to contemplate more deeply what the piece communicates, and then perhaps rumination over what the message of the piece says about life or humanity on a general scale.  I think, then, that these reactions may apply as well to the portraits, at least if they are displayed together.

"I am concerned with the blurring of human and animal, of existing and not existing, of being alive and not," Rovner says.  "We all share a struggle for existence.  It doesn't matter if one is human or an animal, a plumber or an electrician.  We all experience the fragility of being.  My work exists between being and not being.  People cover themselves with information and an identity.  These are the costumes of their presentation. Animals carry a different energy..."

Rovner is concerned with animals as symbols because they relate more closely to nature and therefore to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.  I, on the other hand, am more concerned with the beginning of the above statement, the identities we carve out for ourselves and put on like costumes during our own fragile time of being.