New Work in Progress: Deafman's Villa (the Quinta del Sordo of Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes)

Monday, May 26, 2008

New Work in Progress: Deafman's Villa (the Quinta del Sordo of Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes)

I was in Madrid for a large block of time in late 2006 and spent a lot of time dwelling on the notion of old black Spain; that particularly fleeting quality of the Iberian Peninsula sometimes expressed in duende, in the still perceptible backwater of Spanish life held over from the destruction of the Inquisition, and countless fascist regimes, on the country's intellectual life, and the dark, paper manifestations of Goya. After returning from Spain I read Robert Hughes biography on Francisco, and learned, much to my surprise that the late "black paintings" which hang in the Prado, were originally painted directly on the walls of Goya's house (the Quinta de Sordo), and transferred to canvas years after his death.

Goya was an artist without rivals... without peers or contemporaries, without competition in his homeland of Spain. He found artistic brotherhood in the emergent printmaking techniques coming out of England, France, and Italy. He may even have crossed paths with Piranesi in Rome.

Being both a painter for the Spanish court and an social critic through his prints and paintings; Goya was one of the first artists to emancipate himself from the bonds of commissioned work, and in so doing, may have found an alternative form of artistic companionship.

The Deafman's Villa, is a fictional re-imagining of the domestic world in which the "black paintings" came into being, and the situational nature of the old black Spain to which Goya belonged.

(these are the first drawings of a large series to come)

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Artist Biography

Born 1976. Rochester, NY

Lives and Works in Los Angeles, CA

Heather Scott Peterson was born into a family of artists and makers. One of her maternal great-grandfathers was a syndicated cartoonist and an animator of early Walt Disney films. The other owned a violin shop in turn of the century New York. In 1979 her uncle, a minor American artist living in New York, took her to Walter de Maria's recently opened Earth Room, which set off life long palpitations between art and architecture. Having finally realized that she was decidedly a hypenate, she has worked at the feral edges of both disciplines for over a decade. She graduated from RISD in 1998 with a BFA in painting. While there she spent three years poaching creative writing classes at Brown University, and spent a year in Rome, Italy on RISD's European Honors Program. In 2001 she moved to Los Angeles, to begin her Master degree in Architecture from SCI-Arc which she completed in early 2005. In the winter of 2003 she lived on the Swiss-Italian border and worked on ideas for subversive urbanism in Milan, which looked at gypsies and criminals as case studies. She has won several writing fellowships and teaches at a number of art, architecture, and design schools in Los Angeles. She is currently working on a large and painfully labor-intensive sculpture on the history of naming, an imaginative reconstruction of Goya’s Quinta del Sordo, a contemporary agora made from quarried salt, and several books.

Artist Statement

In the 19th century, the German architect Gottfried Semper, would commonly tell his university students his own version of a founding myth of architecture. As a peddler of the origin and relevance of textiles his story begins with the craft of weaving as a pre-condition. A man is walking through the desert carrying a carpet. As the man grows tired and the wind begins to blow he unrolls the carpet, sits down to think and he pulls the carpet up against himself. After some time his arm grows tired from holding up the carpet, so he gathers some sticks to hold it up. As the wind blows harder the sticks become insufficient, and the man now gathers a series of stones to help brace it. The question that Semper provokes is which part of that is the wall; which part of that is the architecture. For Semper, it is the carpet, and despite the lapse of two technologically driven centuries striving to prove otherwise, I am also a devout disciple of the carpet. Because the carpet is not merely a carpet, it is the deep structure of our cultural imagination… the surface on which we have contemplated our histories, our realities, and our fictions. And before it was carried out into the desert and asked to perform the survivalist mechanism on which architecture has been hinged, it was an artifact of representation. A surface on which heraldry and monarchy were invented, or at least complicit. A surface which co-evolved with the histories of painting, sculpture and literature. A cartographic surface on which wars were fought, lands discovered, crops grown, and nuclear payloads dropped.

It is the surface on which I work; one where the status of representation is at stake on multiple fronts, a place in the wild where the visual and the literary meet. It is a way of living imaginatively beyond my means, where the drawing is a provocation of worlds which may have been and of worlds still possible.

Monday, May 26, 2008