On November 11, more than 50 people packed George’s in the Johnson Center for the 2014 Scholar’s Lecture, “Epistemologies of the Studio: Artists Re-Imagining the World.” The lecture was presented by longtime collaborators Suzanne Scott Constantine of New Century College and Lynne Scott Constantine of the School of Art. Each gave a short talk on her most recent work, within an overall collaborative structure that included spoken-word performance, digital images of their own and others’ artwork, ideas on the role of artists’ ways of knowing in bringing about a more just and peaceful world, and a small display of objects from their studio.
Despite using different materials and techniques, Suzanne and Lynne share an interest in creating what they call “visual metonyms” in their work. As Lynne described it in her talk, “A metonym does not represent, but is continuous with those aspects of the world to which it relates. It is visual and verbal language that incorporates materiality; it draws attention to the body of the thing signified; it is gestural, mimetic, perceptual, cognitive, continuous, a means of adding intensity and sharpening the senses, with its non-disjunctive displacement that is, simultaneously, illumination. “
Suzanne’s current mixed-media series, “Fragments,” transforms junk mail, pieces of fabric and small objects from her past into meditative art pieces. Each work is built up in multiple steps and multiple layers, resulting in a visual metonym for the way past and present, trash and treasure, found and chosen materials work together to create the richness of life. Her ostensibly simple art pieces, she noted, are “an amalgam of the detritus of my past and the discards of my everyday life...a reflection of my passion for the discards, the marginal, the scrapped. I transform them all. I am transformed. I understand it only in retrospect. It is archaeological evidence of my fragmented history.”
In her recent series entitled “The Rowboat Project,” Lynne experimented with an image of a rowboat that she remembered from the story of a long-ago family tragedy, undoing and redoing the image in a series of two dozen photographs, performances, videos, written work, and Dada-influenced works of chance. The successive appearances and disappearances of the rowboat became the visual metonym for the workings of memory, magical thinking, grief and longing in the assimilation of tragedy into the fabric of life.
To close their presentation, Lynne and Suzanne read the manifesto on art as social action that they wrote fifteen years ago and have performed after every collaborative presentation since then.
Suzanne Scott Constantine, “Untitled,” Fragments Series, mixed media 2014
Suzanne Scott Constantine, “Untitled,” Fragments Series, mixed media 2014
Lynne Scott Constantine, “Appearances and Disappearances,” from The Rowboat Project, 2012-2014
Lynne Scott Constantine, “Red Boat,” from The Rowboat Project, 2012-2014
Lynne Scott Constantine, “Drama in Central Park,” from The Rowboat Project, 2012-2014