--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some writing on the new work- 2012
Sleeping with old Masters. Brush portraits. Background Paintings.
I had two dreams that laid on top of each other in my mind. In the first I made out with Monet in his garden, I was old and he was young, I was blind but he could see. Afterwards, I felt dust or maybe pollen all over my back and I knew that it glowed in the darkness and it's glow was periwinkle blue. As I tried to rub the color off me it changed to mauve repairing my vision, and then rose around me as smoke. I followed the smoke up into the next dream overhead, where it was coming from the cigarette of Kai Althoff. Although I'd never seen him in real life, he looked beautiful slow dancing with Tammy Wynette to a techno song. The ashes from his cigarette were long, awaiting the fall to her shoulder, and both it and I went unnoticed by the dancers. I walked closely around them to sit at a table. The music popped the table up and down, drumming an offbeat beat and I thought i should check my facebook.
I had to retell a dream to someone, but could only reenact it physically. How embarrassingly personal…
My new paintings begin with my reenactment of the physical movements I record while dreaming at home in my bed. In the studio, my body is wrapped in sheets I've slept in for the dream reenactment project or hosiery material for the sleeping with old masters project.
I use these materials to make an initial physical impression into pools of paint that is then completely wiped away or buried and repainted in an attempt first to recall the initial physical event and then repainted again through transparent layers to "makeover" the event as a fantasy, covering up the memory of what actually happened. This retelling is like an advertisement for a dream.
Wrapped in these form fitting and body related fabrics, I intend to initiate a vocabulary between controlled movements and spontaneous imagery. After the impression, the used hosiery is then draped over their painted counterparts becoming a stand-in for me and the influences that led up to the making of the original painting. By repositioning the brush(hosiery) as subject, the canvas painting as a backdrop, and the body as author of the retelling of a dream all are engaged in an intimate game of role play. It is in this interpretive space, in it's disorientation and diversions, that a debate over who has control over what we are seeing; the maker, the viewer, or the influence of visual culture is aroused.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Rosamund Felsen Gallery 2011 Press release:
With her own physical movements realized and indexed in paint, April Street makes works that evoke the surrealist automatism of a dreamscape. At the same time, they represent a spontaneous outpouring of social, historical and personal constructions of romanticized subjects and subject matter. Using canvases often imprinted with pattern and natural imagery, and utilizing such varied applications and techniques as paint spills, illusionistic detailing, prismatic color and floral motifs, Street has largely relinquished the paintbrush. Instead, she utilizes her own body as well as worn bed sheets to move paint around the canvas. Displaying a skillful lightness of touch, Who threw that sunset at Me culminates as a series of beautiful, highly mysterious and highly allusive paintings, rich in layered meaning.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Statement from the show at Rosamund Felsen Gallery
In thinking about the Los Angeles sky's brightness and intense tie-dyed gradations that have influenced so much of our visual culture, I wonder, do I see this sky as it is in nature or are the imposed movements and artistic notions of others clouding my way. I question if my vision, recall, and even emotional response to it guarantees that what I feel about what I see is my own. I grew up in the mountains of Virginia looking closely at the ground so this expanse is new to me. I am reminded of a friend who looked at the colors of a California sunset one evening and announced she was seeing a 1970's psychedelic flashback even though she wasn't born till 1985…
Slipping in and out of moments of intimate observation and personal narrative, my paintings are beds of elastic space. I want my paintings to be irreducible to abstraction, and at their most illusionary moments, devise to pull the viewer out of the paint and into the reality of the object. My Imagery is created through physical maneuvers while the paint is in its liquid state, and are altered to emphasize various motifs: mobility of meaning, the focus of the eye, and the combinations of disparate styles—such as fantasy art and color field painting.
Closing the physical distance between myself and the imagery I create is an intimate exploration of the dehydration of my skin in the dry climate of Los Angeles. The paintings' shapes converse with and mimic their wooden support, which were made in the humidity of Tennessee then transported to the dryness of Los Angeles. The work's physical travel between locations harmonizes with my desire for my paintings' subject to stay in motion and to project a lasting physical connection to the work after it leaves my hands. I want my paintings to have a complementary relationship to the human form. As our bodies tell our stories of time, gravity and environment, my paintings' canvas and supports are skin and bones that inform, and at points, become my subjects.
Recollection and spontaneous image, body and vision, each painting begins as my inaccurate visual recollections of my body's relationship to its covering during a nights sleep. As we lay underneath sheets and quilts as we sleep, the contours of our bodies cast shadows, making hollows, peaks, and planes. These forms cast in the light between night and day, between dreamworld and its translation to painted object take over the surface of my canvases. By playing this psychological game, I hope to create a dialog between these characters from a night's sleep.
My titles are set up as lines between the characters of a night's sleep: the moon, sun, body, blanket, and sheet . Therefore, the corporeal and celestial are engaged in intimate exchanges about themselves, humanity and the paintings. Their conversations derive from my own poetry, pop culture, and other sources that arose during the making of this work. The titles were formed afterwards as a post text to the individual paintings.
In these new paintings, I gave up agency of the brush, for the most part, to use my body and sheets I had slept in to apply the paint. With human skin next to paint skin, I wanted to arouse a happening between my unconscious mind, and intentional expression through closer proximity.
-April Street 2011
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
R. B. Saul. NY Arts Magazine. February 2009
April Street's paintings bubble over like an interpretation of lyrics, made richer by years of poetic flexibility and lubricous perceptions. Her paintings embed watercolor bloom effects that appear to be dredged through gauzy light, reminiscent of a 70s album cover, fashioned by a transported courtly Fleming on acid. These trippy surfaces connote a cut-and-paste methodology, and yet, are an intricate record of her impressions. By simultaneously combining macro and micro perspectives, Street's psychedelic organizations become an elastic maze of diverse configurations. These configurations form and disinform her imaginative landscapes through her codependent patchworks and shape-shifting narratives.
Even as her colors boldly depart from naturalism, Street's illusory plots and plights consistently concoct objects tangible and figurative, yet heterarchical—not hierarchal—making them irreducible to abstraction. Comprised of intimations, mysterious personal allusions, mirages, and movements, each painting is drizzled with familiarity and mystery, unfolding and dissolving over time, slipping through the grasps of rational comprehension. Within the convergence of figure and space, fact, and interpretation, Street takes the peculiarities of paint and boils it all down to an intimate flurry, a whirlpool of hypnotic defects, willing to ambulate freely through unrelated perspectives.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------