#wendy given

[artspotting]

Wendy Given, The Flowery Dream: Specimen 10, 2010 Mushroom embedment in resin

[nyctaeus]

wendy given

[everybodywantstobefoud]

Wendy Given photography.

[thetutelary]

A PLACE FOR ME TO SPLIT MY SKULL

MT. HOOD WILDERNESS, AUGUST 2013

Enameled, polished canines concealed by tight lips and porous flesh. Slow breath.  Heavy and clambering, my strange, filthy feet labor with tender souls. I am comically unsure of this foreign strata. I grope to grasp the sharp unforgiving shale. Rocks dumb with wisdom, sage silent memory that refuses to move or be named. Four feet, two feet, four again. I shift my cumbersome cryptic shape while the fur, feather, claw, ear and beak chide the awkward and unwelcome. A shrill and primal STOP! STOP! HALT! MEEP!  The trill army unites. I recognize you, yet, I am much more than twice removed. I am fleeting, struggling—grappling to be present, to be aware. Not you. You are innate and so firmly here, aren't you? Confident in your role and pelt. Belonging, existing. My eyes are placed squarely in front. (The better to see you with). Scanning, shifting, focusing on the brevity of your sly dart and dodge. In and out of this devastation you nest and occupy home. Hidden, a riddle of routes, a labyrinth and refuge.  A place for me to split my skull and snap my ankles. I cannot smell you or catch you.  I have no plan for your meat. My nose is filled with my own scent/stink masked with chemicals that you detected a mile away. I gave you a head start while trying not to offend my kind and clan. My time is so brief on many levels…although, maybe not as fleeting as yours. I'll never be as productive or familiar as you. This is my dilemma, not yours. As I glance at my cheap, plastic watch on my porous flesh and think in a trill indoor voice STOP! STOP! STOP! Then smirk to myself and sneer at the rocks as I descend. —Wendy Given Signal Fire  Alpenglow Backpacking Trip Mt Hood, Oregon  August 2013

[diurne-diary]

Drame chez les hommes sapins - Wendy Given

[thetutelary]

Installation images from Whitespace, Atlanta, GA.

[don-dean]

Wendy Given

Wendy Given is an artist living and working in Portland, Oregon.

    Are your pictures closer to documents or myths? 

My pictures are a type of becoming—past and future combined, both chronicle and tradition. What has happened and what can be. Photography is quite mythical, and always has been so. All picture production has potential to be perfidious and misleading. I do not produce pictures to communicate a specific thread of verity or to try to trick the viewer. I construct images to shift and open thoughts, to alter and propagate potential belief.

  Do you believe in the iconography that your photographs represent and deal with?

I do have a cat, yet, my cat is not black.

  Are you exploring your relationship to nature or mankind’s relationship to nature?

Nature, in my work, is a foundation of power, irrefutable and mystifying, both intelligible and arcane. I think animals, rocks, and plants hold keys to the known, the unknown and the essential. They are the true ancients and hold innate unspoken cues—cues that inform the way I believe that art can ultimately function effectively. It is a yearning to tap into awareness, an unspoken understanding that we are all and always will be (as humans) a very important part of nature. A call to be cognizant, to be present.

  Your photographs are based in stories, folklore and mythology, can you talk about how they are translated into reality? Are they real to you?

Folklore and mythology translate through the lens of my images via constructed visual abstraction—truth with a honed bend. Reality is changeable, malleable—the eternal morph. The only reality I can possibly know is time and gravity. All else is ebb and flow, wonder and dark matter.  

  What experience do you want the viewer to have with your work?

I want the work to occupy a place or feeling of familiarity with the viewer, it can be unsettling and at the same time comforting, a humorous position and intense recognition or premonition.

  Ask yourself a question and respond.

What is of relevance in this life, this place I exist?

It is vital for me to remember to look up and to listen carefully to the natural sounds enveloping me, acknowledge all the sentient souls, what is familiar—familial. I will follow the animal tracks. 

I am trying to pinpoint what scares me most when I am alone in the woods or swimming by myself in the ocean. This is relevant to me, this can and should be my reality.

www.wendygiven.com