Debra S. Golden Debra S. Golden "Bartlesville" is an offset lithograph I produced in April of 1994. I prepared the films, flats and plates; the printer was Janice Frey. The negatives for the black text were shot in a conventional copy camera and color separation negatives of the Polaroid SX-70 images were outputted on computer via Photoshop, after some manipulation of contrast and color saturation. The 10"x13" image, which was printed as a broadside but also intended to be separable into four postcards, combines many of the issues I was using in my work at the time.
I was about six months into a project examining the ambiguity I felt toward ideal forms; something I noticed and began to question when I photographed a terra-cotta vase hand-thrown by a fellow artist. An icon of intimate space, the vase took on symbolic, even idealized stature when photographed, echoed by the small, square Polaroid format, Its image propelled drawings, paintings and a series of Polaroid-and-Xerox-transfer collages examining the relationships between images of contained space, the idealized form, and the feminine real body.
The vase, early on in the series, appears in the Polaroid collages as a beautiful but obtrusive object, often taking the place of (my) mouth, head, or eyes, Like ideals of all kinds, it was seductive yet prevented knowledge of the real, the everyday, the idiosyncratic, and, I was trying to say, the feminine. At the same time, all the images of vases seemed, in their symbolism of the female, to make visible something that was not visible, and thereby valued something that was previously undervalued,
When I made "Bartlesville," perhaps because I was bound up with the technical requirements of the piece, I was unaware of how it predicted the direction of the series.
First, the backgrounding of the vase in favor of direct (if still impeded) expression of the face suggests the move away from the ideal as protective device. Second, in this and in later use of dream narratives and the accompanying descriptions of complex dream-spaces, I turned from the idealized (though questioned) single vase image to the metaphor of myself as a text, or as requiring textual expression. The dreams linked the need for elaborated or examined intimate space and the abiding desire to speak; it is in this connection that I remain interested.
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