Diagramming Sentences
In grammar school, you watched as your teacher was diagramming sentences. She hoped you could see how subject-object-verb sequences could sport off-shoots. Verbs dripped adverbs like little runners.How the prepositional phrase could slant right or left, up or down, into the main line of subject-verb-object: and then escape like paper airplanes in a sputter of low lying wings. Scatter zones map to star charts. Reading, and listening to voices reading, opens to empathy, variation, and a feeling of infinity. Being read aloud to, a child listens through her hands...
Each drawing in the series is super-dialogic. A writer's sentences are interacting with my diagramming.The result of this process is a meshed hybridity. In the large vertical drawings, stretching at large from near the top all the way down, is a form like a snake or a woman-snake, if one were to describe it as a representation; more to the graphical point, it's the shape of a quarter rest form in musical notation. The figuration of a quarter rest in the center vertical column of each large drawing is a visual motif, and directive: a sign to pause.
In the exhibition for MCASB, these writers are my companions: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Krystal Languelle, Miriam Reyes, Patricia Lockwood, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Angelica Wagon on behalf of Naraya Songs, Pauline Oliveros, and Myriam Gurba. Drawn from Spanish, Galician, English, and Shoshone.