The first time I saw Lorraine Tady’s artworks I was immediately struck by the impossibility of conceiving, much less picturing, time, motion, and change (and invisible forces more generally) without recourse to spatial metaphors. And to realize this through mediums that are themselves inherently, static (and yes, spatial) is an ambition all the more Herculean. And yet, there are a handful of artists like Tady who appear hell bent on pursuing this elusive capture. It seems to me that an artist working in space-centric media (e.g. painting, drawing, etc.) can choose from only two basic approaches. One, you can try to “picture” time and change through appropriate imagery or ready-at-hand symbols (e.g. a clock); an example might be a painting of a car driving down a road with an added touch of motion blur; or a picture of trees bending in the wind, thus implying the invisible cause of their bending. Or an artist, like Tady, can eschew pictorial representation altogether and take a more “diagrammatic” turn by deploying any number of abstract (non pictorial) visual elements to virtually enact time and change. By characterizing this as “diagrammatic,” I’m not saying that Tady’s artworks look like conventional diagrams; rather I’m suggesting that her unique abstract lexicon redirects the viewer’s inclination to imagine something (which is precisely what pictures do) to a very different kind of engagement, one better described as a process of correlation. Her work draws the viewer into these visually rich, virtual spaces, and once in, stages opportunities to correlate her signature clusters of lines with any number of unseen forces. And this experience is not a mere theater for the retina but, like all great art, it summons forth our distributed intellect, one wholly encompassing the brain and the entire body.
Lorraine Tady | Navigation Series, Compass | 2020 | archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308 gsm | 24 x 20 inches, Edition of 3 | Courtesy of the artist and Barry Whistler Gallery, Dallas
As my eye scans and jumps about her paintings, I‘ve no choice but to accede to their propulsive movements of darting, (curving or strait), accelerating and decelerating lines. I am not passively observing but, on some pre-reflective register, I find myself reciprocally participating. To lift a line from Joseph Goldstein, I’m experiencing a “pairwise progression of knower and known.” (Mindfulness: A Practical Guide to Awakening, 2013) Much like those trees bending to the invisible force of the wind, my mind/body twists and turns to the allusive rhythms of her compositions.
Lorraine Tady | Refraction Frequencies | 2021 | UV ink on canvas | 72" x 60" | Courtesy of the artist and Barry Whistler Gallery
Sometimes, the best way to grasp the essential qualities of a body of artwork is first to understand what it is NOT. To my way of thinking, some artworks aspire to be a noun and others, a verb. Safe to say, Tady’s artworks do not emulate nouns. Even as verbs, they are not what linguists refer to as stative verbs, which, like the “be” verbs, express a state or a condition which is unlikely to change. As we will see, Tady’s work overwhelmingly channels “action verbs” that signal processes in medias res. So before I launch headlong into one of Tady’s paintings, it would help to set the stage by fleshing out this crucial noun/verb distinction. Very briefly, let’s compare the artworks of two well-known abstract artists whose later “mature” paintings lie at opposite poles of the noun/verb spectrum.
Since we’re talking about a spectrum here, there are plenty of paintings situated somewhere in the middle. But way over at the “noun” end, it’s hard to find a better example than the paintings of Mark Rothko. It goes without saying that countless people approach his work as quasi objects of meditation. Not many modern, secular painters have had their works installed in a specially designated chapel, and it’s not uncommon for visitors to liken their trip to this chapel as a kind of pilgrimage. I submit that it’s the paintings’ “noun-like” qualities that at least partially underpin this meditative experience (along with their shimmering and sadly deteriorating color). Like a mandala or a Greek icon, they evoke an aura of profound timelessness. I know from my own encounters with his paintings, I find my gaze oscillating back and forth between the (typically) two or three barely contiguous, feathered rectangles of color. Certainly my gaze is active, but the forms and their interrelations seem frozen in time and space. At least for the moment, nothing’s going anywhere; it’s ok to take a bathroom break.
Left: Mark Rothko | Orange and Yellow | 1956 | oil on canvas | 231.1 x 180.3 cm | Credit: Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Right: Jackson Pollock | Number 4 (Gray and Red | 1948 | enamel on paper | 22.6 x 30.8 inches | Credit: Frederick R. Weisman Foundation
Whereas at the “verb” end of this spectrum I point to the paintings of Rothko’s contemporary, Jackson Pollock, whose work was famously characterized as “action painting.” No less a source of reverence for his admirers, but the experience and tone evoked by his paintings are markedly different. It’s as if I were to take that bathroom break, I might discover that all those tangled lines and drips have shifted if ever so slightly. Obviously both Rothko’s and Pollock’s paintings are fixed, bounded objects, but their virtual worlds afford me radically different experiences.
Lorraine Tady | Electromagnetic Field 2 | 2020 | UV ink on canvas | 60” x72” | Courtesy of the artist and Barry Whistler Gallery
Now let’s turn to my experience experiencing Tady’s, Electromagnetic Field 2. For me to talk about her work in any meaningful way, I must remind myself that I’m never just talking about an object (either a stretched canvas on a wall or a jpeg displayed on a screen) but rather my interactions with that particular object. Immediately as I enter the virtual space of Electromagnetic Field 2, I commence a silent rapport with its pentimenti of spent or currently spending lines of force. Once inside, I’ve no choice but to try to make sense of it all—that’s what humans do. But unlike, let’s say, a traditional still life painting, I’m far less inclined to perceive the visual array before me as a passive void filled with “things,” but rather as an enveloping force field animated by ever-shifting patterns of interactions.
Again, I’m focusing here on Electromagnetic Field 2, but throughout this writing I’ve scattered images of other pieces that would, to a greater or lesser extent, receive a similar treatment—always so many lines doing so many things. With this piece my eye is immediately drawn to the large zone of tangled green/yellow lines that dominate the center and lower right of the painting. As it is the area with the greatest light/dark contrast, it’s hard to miss. Upon closer viewing I realize this is not what I initially perceived which was a seemingly homogeneous mishmash of marks simply “filling” a space. Instead, I sense this as a tensional field animated by two constellations of lines performing different functions. First there are those scribbled clusters that seem to operate on the very cusp of coherence, as if some peculiar species of glyphs in the process of formation. But rather than free-floating entities, they appear reigned in by the gravitational pull of those far more organized, parabolic lines directing and giving form to all this raucous scuffle. Echoing these parabolic paths are the thicker, blue lines passing through and beyond this entire sector, spanning the full expanse of the painting. I find these lines to be especially intriguing as they’re strongly suggestive of sine curves but with a heightened sense of directionality and agency. I could go on but, by highlighting just this limited aspect of just one painting I am suggesting that Tady’s work can be regarded as a kind of graphing—an exceedingly lively diagrammatic visualization of what is otherwise intellectually ungraspable.
Lorraine Tady | Refraction Frequencies 3 | 2021, acrylic on canvas | 24” x 20” | Courtesy of the artist and Barry Whistler Gallery
My exposition may or may not fully align with the artist’s intentions, and it certainly does not address the broad range of artworks and ideas that she is pursuing. However, if only to underscore my clear and present bias toward this particular “reading” of her work, I feel it’s important to close this out by underscoring Tady’s highly unique and hybrid creative process. She is equally at ease working with both analog and digital media, including conventional painting, drawing, printmaking and computer generated imagery. She frequently jumps back and forth from one to the other in the development of a single artwork; a particular work often passes through successive stages that incorporate any or all of these fundamentally different modes of visualization. Yet even when she constrains her explorations to a single medium—let’s say painting—she seems to be looking over her shoulder, as it were, to the potentialities afforded by the others. Indeed, a very productive feedback loop. In light of my extensive observations of Tady’s work, I can’t help but regard her idiosyncratic processes as, themselves, performative correlates with the artworks’ dynamic “content.”
Lorraine Tady | Projection | 2022 | acrylic on canvas | 42” x 36” | Courtesy of the artist and Barry Whistler Gallery
One final thought. Having now spent considerable time inhabiting Tady’s artworks, I’ve come to realize that I too am far better fathomed as a verb than as a noun. If only for a brief moment, I can re-construe myself not as a static, self-enclosed “thing” occupying inert space but rather, as (so exquisitely mapped throughout Tady’s oeuvre) ever-shifting interactions with the surrounding invisible world.
For a more extensive view of Tadys work, go to:
website: lorrainetady.com
instagram: @lorrainetady
gallery: barrywhistlergallery.com