RAIR | 2005-06

Joey Fauerso | San Antonio, tx

Joey Fauerso received her BFA from the University of Iowa and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her paintings and videos have been exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent shows at the Drawing Center in New York; Artpace in San Antonio; the David Shelton Gallery in Houston; and the Mueso de Art Moderno in Medellin, Colombia. She has received numerous grants and residencies, and is an associate professor of art at Texas State University. She lives in San Antonio with her husband Riley, and their sons Brendan and Paul.

www.joeyfauerso.com

Who really knows how long a person remains conscious when their head is cut off in a guillotine?  Joey Fauerso's talented brother is a poet whose playful poem on such a head-rolling event inspires this installation. Neil Fauerso speculates on the possibility for multiple pleasures during a purported final ten seconds of consciousness. As he notes, "Ten. That's a long time."

Starting with a 35-second digital video of Neil's head, Joey Fauerso brings her considerable skill as a figurative painter to her metamorphosis of poem into paint. She uses her hands and eyes to thicken the experience of her brother's words to create an embodied gallery-sized presence. Precise yet painterly portraits are captured from electronic pixels; at least six portraits for every second of video. Just as 10 seconds is a long time to be a head without a body, Fauerso's 227 lusciously rendered and nuanced portraits invite us to meander through the complexity of human expressions. Face-to-face it is almost impossible not to make our own faces.

Joey Fauerso' pixelated gallery marks a sea change in contemporary artists' use of powerful imaging technology. For decades such corporate and government technologies have been associated with the sinister, the banal and, recently, biometric face recognition. Digital imaging is now readily available to compute-savvy tinkerers in the privacy of their own homes and studios. In Joey's hands it is literally turned on its head into a personal, intimate, life affirming, and welcoming project.

Fauerso is deft at introducing an enormous number of associations. Consider just one line of inquiry. Today's computers designate the horizontal as landscape format and the vertical as portrait. This is a legacy from hundreds of years of painting. Yet, Fauerso renders Neil's heads in the horizontal format of television screens, still-lifes and landscapes. We also subliminally read into them the mass media sequencing of comic strips and graphic novels. In their frothy strokes, the echoing grid of 227 sky-blue paintings amplifies our cultural reading of them as changing weather on land, sky and sea. Both the head grid and the sky grid choreograph fluidity that is micro and macro, at once specific step-by-step expressions of face or weather and vaulting catapults into limitless combinations of human emotion and the possibilities of the wild blue yonder.

This elegant installation invites us to spin our own interpretations, to ask our own questions. What are the implications of Fauerso's incomplete grids? Her stretching of time into space? Her flexibility and adaptability? The obsessive nature of her endeavor? The haunting poignancy of Neil's awareness? The resonance of repetition and variation? Fauerso doesn't just lend her hands and eyes to Neil's detached head, she has constructed a means of inviting us all to see simultaneously in ways that are personal, historic, dramatic, everyday, political, and thoughtful.

MaLin Wilson-Powell

May, 2006

Roswell Museum and Art Center

Rair exhibition • joey fauerso “If I’m Thinking, I’m Probably Feeling" •June 3 - July 16, 2006