ARTIST STATEMENT

In his sonnet “Remémoration d’amis belges,” Stéphane Mallarmé compares history to a falling veil, its fabric billowing “fold upon fold.” Just as a gossamer veil, “secretive and visible,” is perceptible only by virtue of the rippling of its folds as it falls away, history is unthinkable outside of time’s unfolding—the past gives “no proof of itself” except in its passing. The unfolding of history suggests a loss of the past ‘as it was,’ and yet Mallarmé’s image suggests too that this loss is what enables us to conceive of the past at all. The folds of the veil make it possible not simply to see it falling, but to see it at all—even to imagine it floating in midair.

I made paper collages of ephemera from my studio before the pandemic, but this became a more significant part of my practice during long periods of lockdown when I was largely limited to the materials I had at hand. Collage became a means of recording the passage of time in semi-confinement, with each cut and fold reflecting the creeping hours and vanishing weeks of the past few years. In collating these materials and painting them pinned to my studio walls, I aim to preserve and to honor these ephemeral materials and the time during which they became significant to me. I want to give evidence to this history by memorializing them as collage and painting. At the same time, I want to make peace with and represent the inevitability of time’s passage, that attempts at preservation, such as collage and painting, are illusory. In this way, collage and painting have a collaborative relationship to time and to decay. To see something lose what it was previously and still hold some order, some logic that marries one paper or scene to the next, is at once reassuring and heartbreaking. Things do continue. No matter the rage and indifferent violence they are subjected to in real time, something happens next. A fold is a moment of profound convergence. It nods at what we can see clearly and points to what we can understand is disappearing out of view but still furtively present. A fold can be undone but a crease will remain. - HANK EHRENFRIED