short-listed for Prix poesie-media 2009, Biennale Internationale des poetes Val de Marne, France, May, 2009
Featured in: Judy Malloy: Retrospective, the 2012 Electronic Literature Organization Conference, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, June 20-23, 2012
Other Exhibitions: Language-Driven Installation Art, Electronic Literature Organization Conference, Brown University, Providence, RI, 2010; E-Poetry 2009, Center of Contemporary Art Barcelona
Conferences, Readings, Presentations: Berkeley Center for New Media Roundtable, UC Berkeley, February 11, 2010, The Future of Writing, UC Irvine, CA, November, 2008; radio interview and reading, Cover to Cover, KPFA, December, 2008;
Judy Malloy:
Paths of Memory and Painting
You are reading Part I:
recollected on this early morning
recollected on this early morning is an electronic manuscript composed of arrays of lexia stacks. Time is elusive, as parallel trails lead to different parts of a narrative told by Dorothy Abrona McCrae, a Bay Area Figurative painter.
In recollected on this early morning, the dense interface reflects fractured memories of a time when California was the last place she saw her husband, Luke, before he died in battle in the Pacific. And, as she sits in the hills painting, events punctuate the need to situate her art practice in this place where they lived together before he shipped out.
The main narrative thread takes part in the San Francisco Bay Area in the years beginning with World War II. But the narrator also recollects other aspects of her life and work and intersperses the lives of California artist adventurers.
recollected on this early morning is part one of the trilogy, Paths of Memory and Painting, that also includes an interlude composed of three recollected scenes, when the foreground and the background merged, and a closing text-based trio sonata with the same name as the trilogy, paths of memory and painting.
These words from my 1992 MLA talk address some of the visual art influences on "recollected on this early morning":
Like Sol LeWitt's Sunrise & Sunset at Priaino, Jennifer Bartlett's Rhapsody, or Lew Thomas's Grass, Sand, Clouds my work is molecular. "The field is one order," Thomas says, "a whole parcel, in which the random parts are blended together by the illusion of similar textures...To reiterate: photographs of grass, sand or clouds transmit their meaning relative to the development of ideas involving scale, setting, randomness and order.
"In other words," Robert Leverant says in the book that accompanied the seminal 1976 Photography and Language show "the single snapshot is unsatisfying to many young photographers, and thus multi-media, sequential, multiple image, and conceptual photography have developed. In these approaches snapshots are used molecularly and the possibilities of the snapshot are as vast and infinite as the Mind itself."
From Judy Malloy, "Between the Narrator and the Narrative", a talk presented at the Modern Language Association Conference, NYC, December 29, 1992
Informed by successive layers of Dorothy's life and art and by my own life as a poet -- who in earlier times created a series of small paintings, photographs, and texts that were presented in "card catalogs" -- recollected on this early morning is composed with interlocking texts that the I/the reader shuffle and reshuffle until the effect is exactly what is desired. The interface is a variation of the interface I designed for the opening section of The Roar of Destiny. (1995-1999)
The work begins with a series of lines of poetry from the narrative. Click or wait for the text to change. To navigate this work, wait for the text to advance, or click on the lexia you want to follow. Hit refresh anytime there is a server glitch.
recollected on this early morning displays most effectively on a screen that is 1200 pixels wide, but it should work on any screen that is larger than that. On larger displays, readers are welcome to use zoom to enlarge the text. For those in need of a more static display, a way to view and select individual lexias is available in a "lines" interface where the reader can select lexias to appear in large print in the upper right section by selecting "next" or clicking on any line in the other sections of the array.
Paths of Memory and Painting is copyright 2008-2010 Judy Malloy.
Last update, October 10, 2017.