Concentrated Words

At the core of Stefana McClure’s austere yet vivid works on paper is a highly idiosyncratic transformation of word into image, and in a way that extends to a more or less constant crossing or testing of borders, for instance between film and drawings, between language and drawings, between different languages, and ultimately between different cultures and mind sets. McClure’s process is exacting but straightforward. Using successive sheets of tracing paper atop a single sheet of specially chosen graphite or wax transfer paper, she inscribes a text of her choice, usually lengthy, time-consuming ones, like pages of footnotes from the famous 8th century Japanese text The Kojiki, or all of a movie’s subtitles, such as all of the English subtitles to the Polish director Krzysztof Kieskowski’s film Blue in one work, and in another all of the Japanese subtitles to the same film, both times in the location where they’d be if you were watching the film either on a movie screen or on your TV. McClure, by the way, who has a real knowledge of Japanese paper-making techniques, pays enormous attention to the physical details of her work, for instance to the very particular color of the paper that she chooses and to its equally particular texture. It’s obvious that she likes to handle this stuff, that she’s richly familiar with it, and that it resonates for her, but this doesn’t prevent her works from suggesting (however partially, however obliquely) the very unpaperlike glow of high tech video monitors or miniaturized renditions of full-tilt movie screens.

As the text McClure is transcribing builds up, the colored surface of the paper gets slowly eroded: she makes her works not by adding to, but taking away, what is already there. And through this taking away, the surface of the paper becomes a complex visual structure on its own, and oftentimes with a pronounced beauty that is enthralling and meditative. Whatever this structure is, however, is not determined by the artist’s subjective choices but by the properties of the language itself, as letters, words, or, as the case may be, Japanese characters, rub against one another, get overlaid and impacted, cancel one another out. At the bottom of McClure’s vibrantly blue works dealing with Kieskowski’s film one sees these empty, but markedly luminous horizontal stripes—a super-condensed version of a couple of hours’ worth of subtitles. Here, language has been shrunken, so to speak; it’s been shortened, blurred, fiercely gathered together, and reconstituted as an ambiguous, borderline force somewhere between presence and absence. It has been turned into a kind of enigmatic silence or stillness that also doubles very nicely as spare geometric forms in a monochromatic field, and one of McClure’s achievements is to make some quirky, conceptually juiced-up renditions of minimalist-inspired works altogether.