10.01.07

Breath Portrait (favorite colors)
by Ann Tarantino

My current body of work is a series of performative, process-based works on paper and canvas, begun while living in Kyoto, Japan. Beginning by blowing ink through a straw, I control my breath to tease the ink into “almost patterns,�? shoots and sprays suggestive of eyelashes, cilia, the plottings from lie detector tests, ancient streets, or a kind of unknown language, combined with fragments of geography and personal history. I later embellish the images with paint and ink such that they take on a nearly figurative heft and assume individual personalities, becoming, in a sense, “breath portraits.�?

More generally, all my work addresses the relationship of the body to psychological and architectural spaces, investigating the way the physical self experiences the world. Drawing from sources including architectural plans, musical scores, knitting patterns, cracks in the sidewalk, and landscape paintings from East and West, my works are maps of travels both literal and figurative, investigating the world’s vast network of competing stimuli and presenting imagined networks of “information�? suggestive of that which swirls continually within our laptops, text messages, and minds.