facsimile \fak sim LISA KOKIN
lē\
Front cover: 48–49 (Democracy a Very Short Introduction) Works of art © 2014 Lisa Kokin. All rights reserved. No written portion of this publication may be reproduced, for any reason, by any means, including any method of photographic reproduction, without the written permission of the author. All inquiries regarding the text should be directed to the author. Essay © 2014 Maria Porges. No artwork may be reproduced in part or in whole without the written permission of the publisher. Design & Photography © 2014 Lia Roozendaal/ Jagwire Design, El Sobrante, CA www.jagwiredesign.com Published by Lisa Kokin and Seager Gray Gallery.
Essay by MARIA PORGES
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Like a bird on the wire
What happens, though, when something or someone
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
takes us to that state in which seeing is only seeing,
I have tried in my way to be free
and the word/world becomes unknown, all over again?
–Leonard Cohen
Like a musical leitmotif, this question frames Kokin’s
airy, unframed works, floating off the wall on silver pins.
Like: Lisa Kokin’s (fac)simile
These oversized facsimiles of page spreads from books
Lisa Kokin’s most recent body of work takes its viewers
linens, and—used here for the first time in her work—
back to a place beyond which most of us passed
zippers. Cut away from the fabric matrix used to attach
unconsciously, long ago, to the moment when visual
them to clothes or pillows, small, disembodied chunks of
language recognition occurs: the ‘aha’ moment when
zipper teeth become stand-ins for words, sewn in neat
seeing becomes reading. Everything from the mundane
lines on facing pages of faux text. Like Chuck Close’s
(road signs, instructions, advertising) to the exquisite
pixelated color portraits, the closer we get, the less
(poetry, love letters) relies on our immediate, involuntary
meaning we can read. What we need, then, is the big
recognition of text. We can’t help it.
picture; the backstory; the words behind the words.
are made principally of thread, sometimes from old
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As is often the case for Kokin, her transformative exploration of a new material began with a chance encounter. At a fabric giveaway hosted by a friend, she found bags of cut-down zippers, the cloth all but removed to prepare them for some still-unknown purpose. Without the textile that defined their function, the zippers became mysterious, suggesting chain, or the cast lead type used in linotype printing. She picked up the bags and brought them home. In time, their use would reveal itself. Books were a constant part of the landscape of Kokin’s childhood. Her parents, self-taught intellectuals who had their own upholstery business, were passionately interested in politics and read widely—theory, fiction, and history. For many years, she has carried around several boxes of English and Yiddish books that were passed down to her from her maternal grandfather.
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Similarly, having grown up in and around her parents’ business, machine sewing is as familiar to Kokin as breathing. She uses it to draw, to write, to attach; sometimes, to make an entire piece out of thread alone. For decades, she has explored myriad ways in which these familiar methods and materials (sewing, thread, buttons; book making and books, deconstructed) can be used to open up subjects which are—as she puts it wryly—hard to talk about. It is all but impossible, she finds, for people to agree about the rightness or wrongness of certain actions. What is clearly inevitable and necessary to some is just as obviously needless, ignorant and profoundly unnecessary in the eyes of others, particularly in the context of religion and/or nationalism.
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Sometimes, Kokin asserts, the only way to come at an issue is indirectly; to show and not tell. Among the subjects she examines in Facsimile (at times, using her grandfather’s books as source material) are the selling of democracy and her complicated personal relationship to Jewishness and Israel. She had intended to begin using the books physically— dismembering them, as she has other books gathered from recycling facilities and thrift stores—but in the end, found herself unable to take that step. Instead, pages from volumes including Walt Whitman’s poems and Oscar Wilde’s collected writings became her visual inspirations.
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Exasperated by the recent Supreme Court decision allowing
unfettered
corporate
contributions
to
candidates in elections, Kokin selected three different page
spreads—one
from
Alexis
de
Tocqueville’s
eighteenth-century classic Democracy in America and two others from paperback introductions to American government.
Each of these three pieces reproduces
the rhythms of the printed words from their respective sources using zipper fragments; in addition, shredded currency has been sewn into the thread matrix that supports the lines of ‘words’—serving as a reminder, perhaps, that money permeates everything, including the foundation of government. In each, the parameters— both of the physical stuff of which they are made and of its handling—shift subtly, demonstrating the way in which Kokin resolves ideas both conceptually and through the exploration of process and materials.
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Similarly, two other pieces, Compassion and Empathy (both subtitled Cruelties of Prison Life), offer slightly different approaches to difficult content. Each takes a passage from Oscar Wilde’s essay-length letter to the editor of the London Daily Chronicle, written a little more than a century ago, pleading for better treatment for children and the mentally ill in England’s prisons. Wilde knew firsthand what being jailed was like, having served two years of hard labor for the crime of being publicly gay. By all accounts, the experience broke him; he died, not long after his release, at the age of 46. In Empathy, Kokin has painstakingly stitched the words of Wilde’s text, giving us the illusion that we can actually read the passage she has chosen. But only phrases here and there are legible. The process of completing the piece requires immersion in water. During this last step, Kokin allowed the letters to distort and twist, collapsing into themselves.
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Compassion uses a different strategy. Only a few words and isolated letters have been stitched, in beige and brown, on what appear to be fragments of old table linens. Though these few words are clear, without the connecting text that remains invisible the sense of the whole is lost— though what we can see might be more powerful than the complete sentences could be. Words like ‘sheer terror’ and the truncated phrase ‘lonely and unfamili’ stand out. Nearby, single isolated letters, like tiny muffled voices, invoke the sheer awfulness of putting small children alone in the dark, stinking cells that Wilde describes.
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Three pieces in this exhibition reflect on a constellation
against the Jews exists historically and continues. Yet
of issues Kokin has pondered for a lifetime, as the
all of it—annotation, text, highlighting—is completely
granddaughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants:
asemic, meaning it has no specific semantic content,
Zionism, Palestine and the history of the Jewish people.
and consists only of abstract marks, leaving what is
In Armed Shepherd Tending his Flocks, the illustration of
described as “a vacuum of meaning which is left for the
the Israeli herder, gun on his back among his fleecy sheep,
reader to fill in and interpret.1”
is exquisitely rendered in thread. Lines of toothy, metallic zipper fragments fill the rest of the two pages. Kokin has long wrestled with the question of what happens when the oppressed become oppressors—when tolerance, or the lack of it, becomes ideological. In a sense, the zippers, with their suggestion of closed mouths or minds, have a heightened role in some of Kokin’s work. In Dislike of the Unlike, for example, extensive annotation and highlighting, rendered in multiple colors of thread over lines of zipper text, explicates why prejudice
The meaning of the word facsimile is—complicated. It is defined as both an exact replica of a printed document and as a copy that is as true to the original source as possible. To further complicate things, hiding within it is the word simile—a figure of speech in which two unlike things are compared to each other, most often by using the word ‘like.’ 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing See also www.asemic.net, Tim Gaze
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Kokin’s sewn pages give us the rhythm of the texts from which she draws (and the accompanying illustrations), but to keep the proportions of line height to page size the same, the scale of these pieces is about 250% of the originals. This shift has several interesting effects. For one thing, the works feel like they are the ‘right’ size from the kind of viewing distance at which we usually contemplate works of art and not books. In addition, it brings to mind one of Kokin’s favorite things: dictionaries, from which she has also made three pieces for this exhibition. Taken as a whole, the big pages in Facsimile might serve as a kind of mourning for our collective loss of massive volumes set on stands—all but replaced, now, with websites: books through which we could page slowly, looking at the pictures and reading definitions for words we didn’t even know we wanted to learn, all of us connected together by the thread of shared humanity, curiosity, and compassion.
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List of Works Front cover 48–49 (Democracy a Very Short Introduction) Zippers, thread, shredded money 26 x 28.5 inches, 2014 Page 1 Empathy, detail Diptych; thread. 19 x 23.75 inches, 2014 Page 2 Spread Zippers, thread, 11.5 x 33 inches, 2014 Page 4 – 5 Point System and detail (Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Large Print Edition) Zippers, thread, cotton 15.5 x 20.25 inches, 2014 Page 6 – 7 Peachblow Peccability and detail (Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language) Zippers, thread, linen 25 x 16.25 inches, 2014
Page 8 – 9 Armed Shepherd Tending His Flocks and detail (The Standard Jewish Encyclopedia) Zippers, thread, linen 23 x 29 inches, 2014 Page 10 – 11 40-41 (The Democratic Way of Life) and detail Zippers, thread, shredded money 19.5 x 21.75 inches, 2014 Page 12 – 13 Empathy and detail (Cruelties of Prison Life, Oscar Wilde) Diptych; thread, 19 x 23.75 inches, 2014 Page 14 – 15 Compassion and detail (Cruelties of Prison Life) Thread, found textiles 19 x 25.25 inches, 2014 Page 16 Dislike of the Unlike, detail (Modern Jewish Problems) Zippers, thread, linen 21 x 27.5 inches, 2014
Page 18 – 19 Equilibrium and detail (Britannica World Language Dictionary) Zippers, thread, linen 27 x 20 inches, 2014 Page 20 – 21 Long Story Short Zippers, thread, wire 7.5 x 10 inches each, 2014 Page 22 Treatise Zippers, thread, 33.5 x 9.5 inches, 2014 Page 23 Trilogy and detail Triptich; zippers, thread 11.5 x 8.5 inches each, 2014 Page 24 – 25 248-249 (Democracy in America) and detail Zippers, thread, shredded money 21 x 26 inches, 2014 Page 26 Dislike of the Unlike (Modern Jewish Problems) Zippers, thread, linen 21 x 27.5 inches, 2014
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Selected Solo Exhibitions 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2007 2004 2002 2001 2000 1999 1997
Facsimile, Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA Saddle Stitch, Craighead Green Gallery, Dallas, TX How the West Was Sewn, Boise Art Museum, Boise, ID In Another Vein, Gail Severn Gallery, Ketchum, ID Raveling, Seager Gray Gallery, Mill Valley, CA Speaking Volumes, Tayloe Piggott Gallery, Jackson, WY Panacea Plus, Donna Seager Gallery, San Rafael, CA Joy of Booking, Mendocino College, Ukiah, CA Ex Libro, Donna Seager Gallery, San Rafael, CA Fruit of the Broom, Jenkins Johnson Gallery, New York, NY Attachments, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA Secondhand Memories: Sewn Found Photographs, Gallery Connexion, Fredericton, NB, Canada Domestic Intelligence: Books by Lisa Kokin, San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco, CA Relative Obscurity, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA Salvaged Histories, Nine Gallery, Portland, OR Sew to Speak, Kennedy Art Center, Holy Names University, Oakland, CA Lost and Found, Island Mountain Arts, Wells, BC, Canada Bookmaking Is Not a Crime, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC Flea Market Economy, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA Art Book Art, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA Circumstances Beyond Our Control, Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, CA
1996 Remembrance, Buchenwald Memorial, Weimar-Buchenwald, Germany 1995 Fond Objects, Morphos Gallery, San Francisco, CA 1994 Tome Is Where the Art Is, Gallery Connexion, Fredericton, NB, Canada 1992 Tales of a Nice Jewish Girl and Unearthing, Definitely Superior, Thunder Bay, Ont., Canada and Artcite, Windsor, Ont., Canada Remembrance, Judah Magnes Museum, Berkeley, CA 1991 Persistent Memory, The Lab, San Francisco, CA 1989 Award of Excellence Show, Surface Design National Conference, Gatlinburg, TN 1988 Vestiges: Work in Fiber by Lisa Kokin, Pitt International Galleries, Vancouver, BC, Canada 1986 Batiks and Drawings of Lisa Kokin, The Women’s Building, San Francisco, CA 1985 The Batiks of Lisa Kokin, Centro Cultural Vergueiro, São Paulo, Brazil 1984 Daybreak: Nicaragua/El Salvador, Galerie Franz Mehring, Berlin, Germany The Past Will Not Return, Exploratorium, California State University, Los Angeles, CA Lisa Kokin’s Studio at Galería de la Raza, San Francisco, CA
For a complete listing of art work and exhibitions please visit: LISAKOKIN.COM | For exhibition and sales please visit: SEAGERGRAY.COM 28