About
2015-2016
Tool to chew your worries and spit them out as shiny stones
Feedback loop device for your heart and your hands…..or someone else’s hands
Tool for smelling a bee’s buzz
Tool to hear weeds pollinate and take over the world
These are some of the descriptions that make up a “toolbox in the head”. They may or may not exist ….depending on your take on existence. You can imagine them, you can draw them, you can build them and then, maybe, you can use them.
In the exhibition, Toolbox In The Head, Stephanie Cormier has taken some of her written descriptions and read them to her young daughter, asking if she might draw them as she imagines them. These drawings have served as prototype renderings that Cormier is using to produce a series of silkscreen prints.
The project is inspired by a performance by Dennis Openheim in the 1960s, Two Stage Transfer Drawing. He described the work that he performed with his son, “As I run a marker along Eric’s back, he attempts to duplicate the movement on the wall. My activity stimulates a kinetic response from his sensory system. I am therefore, Drawing Through Him.”
By creating objects first in the head and then through words, another being, their hand, and back to the artist’s eyes and hands, there is a collaborative “filtration” system that produces unprecedented and layered forms.
Much of Cormier’s work is project based and has taken different directions and mediums over the years. She works in sculpture, installation, photography, collage and video. Some things that connect her work and research are the attention to objects and materials as they relate to the human, and our perception and phenomena of experiencing the world. There is special attention to wonder, speculation and the limits of human understanding and expression.