Tina Pulliam Posts:

Manifesto Drawing

Minimalism in concept combined with strength in message. The idea of stripping away all the congested imagery that clouds the eye and mind in order to find the clear story the artist is intending. My manifesto is projecting an idea of story telling with the least amount of flora and fawna. Developing an idea based on color or shape or strength of placement. I have produced a simple form that is cylindrical in nature yet speaks a figural language visually and in touch. The tactile experience is a large part of my work. I desire to reproduce a feeling through touch. The viewer coming in contact with the piece and forming an emotional imprint through the messages sent by the hand are an integral part of my work. I refine the surfaces to help my viewer receive the true message for that piece. I have developed a list of rules that prevent me from incidentally creating a smoke screen that could cloud the senses and taint the viewer’s experience. I assembled these rules together in an attempt at collecting a tactile response. Artists that use a simplistic method at telling a story using a deconstructed level of information can make the strongest statement in return gathering a powerful viewer impact and response.

1. No layered images

2. No gratuitous lighting

3. No legible text

4. No categorized human associations

5. No glossy magazine page qualities

"Tina Pulliam Selects"

Sara Flynn

Cluster Vessels

“Cocktail Party”

County Cork Ireland

2009

Sara uses clustering to create an association with her pieces. They are placed in a socializing manner giving the sense that these pieces are associating somehow with each other. She plays with the idea of placement of inanimate objects to tell a story. Her story telling is clear and defined without the use of the typical imagery we associate with story telling. Her “cocktail party” of objects surrounds a blushing pot with shocked on-lookers. She is not giving gender, she is given race, and she is not giving sexual orientation, political or religious affiliation. She is not providing the sex of the pieces or using text. Her current direction of her porcelain installations is not offering us many of the typical classifications. Sara has stripped away the clues to what people would typically use to group or categorize others. She peels away the diversions that cloud the simple yet strong imagery of attachment and relational connections. She has clearly put limitations on herself to the information that the viewer is given. It is obvious that she has gone to great lengths to give as little information possible. What we are given in much of her work is isolation, protection, abandonment, nurturing, pairing, the many ways that we gather or couple ourselves. The emotional book we page through as we see these pieces cluster gives the viewer a universal and easily relatable to all people the simple ideas of association and gathering.

Andy Warhol

“Nine Jackies”

Metropolitan Museum of Art

1964

The emotional response to the ever-fading image of Jacqueline Kennedy connects the viewer to a highly charged event of the time, the photographic moment before her husband John F. Kennedy was shot. Warhol told this story with placement of image, repetitive reuse of image and how he treated the image. He exposed the beauty of a last moment before tragedy. This is a unique moment in time yet this is also a universal emotion. The last captured moment is something a lot of us can draw out of our own lives. The last photo, the meal, the last smile, the last goodbye, he played upon that with the delicate handling of a single image. Using an un-reloaded screen where each image takes advantage of an ever-reducing amount of ink created an effect of film flip or stop film stills. He makes us a voyeur into her life. He takes the shock of that moment and told it in slow motion. Warhol collected this iconic image from a newspaper clipping and told a story without words, which is not only beautiful but also haunting.

Heather Rowe

“Tenuous Arrangements”

Indianapolis Museum of Art

2010

Heather’s disturbing arrangement of wooden framework and metal beams give a message of disoriented space. She created a minimal structure with minimal information playing on the emotions connected with tension and disorientation, filling transitory spaces with raw banal materials that are constructed as a loose framework to an unfinished space. This gives an illusion of danger and in turn puts the viewer in a gear of tentativeness and apprehension. She only inserts small fragments of hardware material such as a table leg, a fragment of carpet or mirror to give the suggestion of house construction. She gives her viewer very little information to guide them around the piece. She sends her messages to the viewer by praying on their insecurities about the space. Like the simplest brushstroke, it is a minimal slip of information inserted to give a message. The fractured construction and displaced use of space shatters an idea of solid and hollow. The structure gives an ambiguous state of neither being built nor being torn down. This is another layer of disorientation for the viewer by the pure state of the lack of information given. This relationship that the viewer has with her work is that of curiosity about the fractured space posed against the distance they keep and apprehension to approach.