Lorraine Tady’s solo exhibition Sparklines is on view at Barry Whistler Gallery through November 25, 2017.

Most of the works in this exhibition are titled with reference to the Octagon Vibration Series (OVS). But I was fascinated to learn that the relationships among the different individual pieces here are quite complex and intricate. The reference to the OVS is only the beginning of the family resemblances among them, so to speak. You said that the OVS is an “inverted continuation” of the earlier L.E.D. series; these two series are clearly distinct from each other. Could you start by describing the origin and nature of the Octagon Vibration Series, and how did it ultimately lead to the body of work in this show?

My Octagon Vibration Series/OVS started in 2013 as an inverted continuation of my L.E.D. series. “Inverted” is psychological as well as digital. Sometime after I thought of them as “inverted” I put an L.E.D. painting in Photoshop “invert” and I recognized the drawings. Things often happen like that, with intuition and fact moving back and forth, not necessarily one before the other, or not always one or the other, but both. The black paintings with bright lines in my 2013 exhibition L.E.D. (The Title of the Exhibition is like a Poem) began with a mental picture of electricity and dark water gleaned from Lautreamont’s 1868/69 Les Chants de Maldoror that I read in 2006. Further inspiration included seeing a resonant yellow line on the airport tarmac and thinking, “I’d like to make a black painting with a yellow line.” These thoughts evolved with sonar and radar as homage to leading, finding and the heaviness of a searching act.

So, in 2013, sometime during or after the making of the work that became the L.E.D. show, I did some printmaking as a guest at SMU-in-Taos (New Mexico). I was doing monotypes and started mixing in stencil shapes because I was tired of my brushy, heavy, gestural line and wanted something for the fat line to jut up against. I started using stencils and bringing in some thin, mechanical lines using a ruler. (In 2003 I did engineering, machine-like drawings, but never used a ruler.) I was using a lot of blue and white and I felt these new monotypes had something to do with the New Mexico clouds. When I came back, I started working on 60 x 44 inch paper using similar strategies, blue shapes (defined with taped edges), stencils, hand drawn lines and mechanical/ ruler lines.

I had been familiar with Emma Kunz’s work since the 2005 show at the Drawing Center in New York in 3x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint and Agnes Martin. As a student in 1988 in Chicago I had seen the show The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 and it struck a deep chord of kinship. The arcane has always been there because I’ve always felt it. The artists Sigmar Polke and Terry Winters’ process and serial investigations were also very influential in my early education at that time. As a curator I have also delved into the themes of Alchemy or Change (2008), Color System, Color Strategy (2010) and Sonic Architectonic (2012). Therefore, after feeling really drawn to make several works and continue the series, I dubbed it “Octagon Vibration Series” (or OVS). Most of my titles come to me while playing with different words in the studio and writing down phrases while I am working. When it is time to exhibit, I go back through my sketchbooks and see my options and I pick one that feels right. Therefore, the OVS subtitle is partially in recognition of the Swiss artist/healer Emma Kunz (1892-1963) who harnessed spiritual energy and used a divination tool in her abstract drawings to find beneficial results for her patients. OVS has a type of positive energy after so much heaviness, yet both OVS and L.E.D. have a searching element. Agnes Martin shared her lines emanate from a type of positivity, so I feel a kinship with her line, also.

As to how it led to the body of work in Sparklines, my printmaking continued but moved to drypoint on copper plates in my studio. The friction of dragging the line into copper is more satisfying than monotype. The effort slows you down and gave me the line that I was looking for (and the image could be “stored” and used again, like a stencil). Chine-collé with archival grid paper, sometimes painted with watery ink lines, gave me more options. I had distilled my work down to a palette of blue, white and graphite/black and wanted to continue it. I like to set up specific games or limitations in my work and that was one. I was interchanging the copper plates and making monotype-like images with 4-5 plates making one image. The “parts” of these 50 small copper plates often echoed or fed the drawings and paintings and vice versa. Many of these multiple plate drypoint prints with chine–collé anticipated my trip to Iceland and were exhibited in Before Iceland (2015). When I came back I certainly felt some of the new drawings contained my travel experience and even some of my drawing decisions were based on maps and excursions there. However, the “Escape Hatch” set in the show defined themselves for me as a want to escape and travel more. The Effigy and Cahokia drawings in Sparklines are as distinctive to place as the Iceland 2016 drawings Isafjordur (Westfjords, Iceland), Myrafell (Westfjords, Iceland) and Dynjandi (Westfjords, Iceland) shown in Tangled up in Blue, a year before Sparklines.

Since I work on several pieces over a long period of time, let them simmer and bring them out again, a timeline sort of happens. It is not always in a direct way, but in a way that makes sense to me as I work. Groups or series may define themselves over time, yet have specific lineage.

Since I work on several pieces over a long period of time, I let them simmer and bring them out again, a timeline sort of happens.

Within this exhibition, I wanted to ask you about a few of the groups of pieces that relate to one another. First, there are the four works on the far left wall, all of which are titled “Escape Hatch,” each graphite, pastel, and pigment on paper, and five feet tall [and subtitled Above and Below, Transparent, Elevation, and Between, respectively]. To me, these look like the most clearly “architectural” pieces in the show, all using both solid shapes and linear outlines, all using multiple perspectives. The palette uses different blues. Can you talk about where these came from? You mentioned Iceland.

The Escape Hatch drawings, yes, distinguished themselves as a set and feel more architectural to me, too, that is why I subtitled them. They were me after having travelled to Iceland and wanting to travel more, feeling locked in Dallas. A limitation in blue and white was still satisfactory and I felt I had more to draw. I picked up some unfinished drawings and started some new ones using a direct enlargement of parts from the Before Iceland prints. In 2014, I had lost my home of 23 years in a terrible divorce and in hindsight I felt this group had something to do with building and longing for rooms, moving through rooms, escaping bad situations and moving into new rooms. Each drawing has a hatch-like part. I noticed the drawing not on display, Octagon Vibration Series, Escape Hatch/Up Close and Far Away, even has a house-like shape on its side projected above an expansive, horizontal, undulating shape. This wasn’t really a house when I drew it, but looking back it is an interesting point of view about that topic. On the other hand, rural Iceland has some really interesting, simple buildings that are striking against the empty landscape and waterways. One remembers this landscape (or thing), projects it in the mind, turns it around in space and ponders it.

Forgetting all the personal stuff for a moment, it is simply drawing, thinking, reacting, building and moving through spaces I create or appropriate in the drawing. Sofia Bastidas, Pollock Gallery Curator, Southern Methodist University, came to my show and shared something I responded to. She said, “The blue and white drawings act as renderings and as as much as technology saturates most of our visual sense, these drawings maintain the trace of human scale renderings, which allow them to breathe in the architectural vernacular of the imaginary.” One of my favorite shows at MoMA was The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection in 2003.

The friction of dragging the line into copper is more satisfying than monotype. The effort slows you down and gave me the line that I was looking for (and the image could be “stored” and used again, like a stencil).

I also wanted to ask about the three works on the right-hand wall: two digital prints on paper, Untitled 1-R and Untitled 2-R, and one painting, OVS / Radial Velocity. In my mind, I was contrasting these with the “Escape Hatch” group. These three all have a warmer palette: reds, oranges, yellows. They also seem “architectural” to me, but maybe flatter and more compressed, compared to the “Escape Hatches.” But what I wanted to ask you about was the way you can translate and develop work from one medium to another. You said that you “rebuilt and mixed” parts of the multiple-plate drypoint prints OVS #22 and OVS #27 to create the digital print Untitled 1-R. Then you also used Untitled 1-R in creating the paintings OVS/Radial Velocity and OVS/Red Shift Frequency Fold. The relationships among these different works are complicated and subtle! Can you describe them in more detail?

I mostly began to mix and mash my Before Iceland jpeg print images in Photoshop using selected tools and intentional range variations. I printed them out and took advantage of running out of print ink, re-scanned and re-printed altered images, etc.

For the new work in Sparklines I applied direct drawing on large paper, but also rebuilt and mixed parts of my OVS multiple plate drypoint/ Before Iceland prints using digital programs and creating works such as the print Untitled 1-R (2017). Since technology (the photograph, Xerox machine or new digital programs) has always been a tool for artists of my generation, I was curious now to employ digital printing to canvas as part of my painting process as well as take the Before Iceland prints to another level of investigation and variation.

I started by playing with some glitch programs introduced to me by my friend, colleague and artist John Pomara. But in order to do my own thing, I mostly began to mix and mash my Before Iceland jpeg print images in Photoshop using selected tools and intentional range variations. I printed them out and took advantage of running out of print ink, re-scanned and re-printed altered images, etc. You know, I love color, and as previously mentioned, I had specifically limited my OVS palette as an investigative theme. The digital results had a range of colors (I now have a lot of files) but the red ones resonated with me to proceed with them in Sparklines.

Moving forward to employ digital printing to canvas as part of my painting process, I found it was cheaper to print at 40 percent. Since I’ve always struggled financially I chose to see it as a meaningful decision because it was to serve as a starting ground to paint over, so why print at 100 percent? The hardest part is mediating the digital ground with the painted surface, but as a printmaker, we are mediating different levels all the time; and when I draw or paint, I often wait several months between layers; so it was sort of what I had been doing all along.

Enlarging select new digital images and printing them at 40 percent would allow me to paint on top of the printed ground and continue the making of my overall image. The painting Octagon Vibration Series/Radial Velocity (2017) is an example. OVS/Red Shift Frequency Fold is a variation of using the same ground as Radial Velocity.

These thoughts evolved with sonar and radar as homage to leading, finding and the heaviness of a searching act.

I was also interested to learn about how some of the works have been inspired by particular places, some of which show up in their titles, for example, Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Illinois, and Effigy Mounds National Monument in Harpers Ferry, Iowa. Your travel to Iceland also plays a part. But here too, the situation is more complex than it might appear at first. In fact, you often will work on a piece over a long period of time. Then you might give the work a title, associated with travel to a particular place, at a decisive moment, before continuing to work on the piece. Could you describe an example of how a particular place inspired the title of a piece, within the overall process of creating it from beginning to end?

In both the Cahokia and Effigy Mounds drawings, I liked moving on to various greens. I had been using blue for a long time and was wondering if it was ready to change. I like red, but the red proved to be too much and one of my red attempts turned into the dark blue drawing Octagon Vibration Series/ Magnetic Passage over the Harbor, North Lights/ Norðurljós (2017). I was also starting drawings with blue backgrounds (more directly like blueprints) but those are still in process and not part of the show (and may be abandoned, who knows?) At the time green won out and I was working those two drawings during the green painting Octagon Vibration Series/ Blue Shift after Effigy Mounds National Monument, Harpers Ferry, IA (2017). I think you are also thinking of the story I told you about Effigy Mounds. The hike to the top consisted of infinity rooms of green with brown vertical tree trunk lines. That trip had so much green. That experience either influenced the green or confirmed what was happening in the work’s direction.

I also did a road camping trip to Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and Mesa Verde, Colorado. There is a legend that various Hopi clans migrated in the four directions. There are striking similarities in the forms and patterns of the mounds and ancient structures in the Southwest and across the continent.

A shape configuration in the Cahokia drawing made me think of Teotihuacán, a place I’ve wanted to visit. I realized the largest pyramid type mound in the United States was on the way to a road trip to visit my parents, so I decided to stop and to see it. As mentioned, I had previously been to Effigy Mounds in IA, had grown up seeing Ohio’s Serpent Mound, studied a lot about the Plains Indians and I started to see a pattern.

Before this new trip, I had taken the Cahokia drawing to a place where it lingered for a long time and hung on the wall. I had no intention of it becoming about Cahokia, but the pyramid sculptural shape in the drawing felt like a key to its resolution and in my studio process I knew I just needed to wait and work on some other things.

On Feb. 12, 2017, I posted the Effigy Mound drawing on Instagram. I wrote: “Last summer I visited the Effigy Mounds National Monument. I came home and made drawings perhaps influenced by that visual, visceral and subtle transcendent quiet. I was re-reading Black Elk Speaks and the Dakota Pipeline fiasco was happening.” Scott Gleeson commented the drawing “was reminiscent of Albers’ Graphic Tectonics of ancient Pre-Columbian ruins.” I thought: of course! This is the key.

I came back from Cahokia and was able to complete the Cahokia drawing from my experience. I named the Effigy Mound drawing. I also did a road camping trip to Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and Mesa Verde, Colorado. There is a legend that various Hopi clans migrated in the four directions. There are striking similarities in the forms and patterns of the mounds and ancient structures in the Southwest and across the continent.

You’ve been interested specifically in not only the Native American mounds at Cahokia and Effigy Mounds, but in Plains Indian history more generally. You mentioned Quanah Parker, who is well known here in Texas, and also the Dakota Access Pipeline protests. Can you say something about how this particular culture and history informs your work?

When I first stepped in the red dirt of Abiquiu, New Mexico, I was surprised that I felt like I was home… I played as a child in the woods a lot and was often alone. In high school I discovered Thoreau, Emerson and Transcendentalism and definitely found nature to be mystical.

SMU-in-Taos introduced me to the west. I originally wanted to move to NYC but that didn’t happen for me for various reasons. Columbia University gave me a scholarship but the financial aid department laughed at me when I visited them for my MFA. I had been accepted but had no money, not enough financial support and she told me the loans “just to have a studio in NYC” would kill me. Maybe she was right. That was 1989 before all this student loan talk.

Anyways, SMU offered me a full tuition scholarship, a Teaching Assistantship (which I desired) and everything worked out. Columbia was having a lot of departmental changes then, too. I had never had a preoccupation with the West; just loved horses. So, when I first stepped in the red dirt of Abiquiu, New Mexico (while at SMU-in-Taos), I was surprised that I felt like I was home. (Both the desert and the island feel good to me.) I played as a child in the woods a lot and was often alone. In high school I discovered Thoreau, Emerson and Transcendentalism and definitely found nature to be mystical.

Plains Indians are indigenous people and I don’t want to romanticize them, but the way place and awareness of the spirits are integrated into their way of living and how they interpret their experience of their world resonate with me. The West resonates with me more than Australian indigenous people, why? I don’t know because I’ve never been there. I also just like history and the imaginations of what North America was like before we cut down all the trees, plotted the land and industrialized it! (By the way, Shaman is a great book by Kim Stanley Robinson. It is about the indigenous people of Europe who may have been the Lascaux cave painters.) I like nature and history. People I met through SMU taught me a lot about Plains Indians culture and art.

When Matt Garcia of Desert Art Lab came to visit UT Dallas recently and gave a talk about his heritage and social practice art, he said all of DFW was the last hold out of the Comanche nation. That fascinated me because this is where I am. I was in conversation about this with Arts & Humanities Dean Dennis Kratz and he said I should read Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History by S.C. Gwynne. I checked out the book from our library and read it. I had previously reread Black Elk Speaks.

I was working on my painting Octagon Vibration Series/ Blue Shift after Effigy Mounds National Monument, Harpers Ferry, IA (2017). Early on in its development was the Pipeline protests and I was so enraged about it all that when I was in the studio I thought, “Am I making a political painting?” However, I’m just not that kind of artist. I feel that the work ended up being about some sort of transcending above the horror; that the earth, Gaia, will survive. I’m an optimist but I am deeply affected by the state of things recently. Somehow the mounds are transcendent for me, I don’t know why.

In this exhibition, there are some important references to, let’s say, applied or functional forms (you mention graphs, diagrams and projections). The title of the show, Sparklines, refers to a concept from Edward Tufte in informational graphics. Architectural plans are also significant. However, that is only one side of the work. Equally important is the more intuitive side of subjective experience. You also refer to the “spiritual energy” of Emma Kunz. Can you explain how these two things, the architectural/functional and the intuitive/spiritual, come together in your work?

Edward Tufte’s “intense continuous time-series” reduction of data into a strong, specific graphic line (from The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983) was eventually re-named “sparklines” in 2006. Sparklines as my exhibition title is a tag for my own poetic translation of Tufte’s “extreme compaction of process and experience” into a line. You’re catching me at a funny time for this interview. I am stumbling over myself to write about my work. The analytical in my work gives me some distance and keeps me from being consumed. A diagram is a way to portray transference into another state of being. It distills and translates information.

Wright State University (where I received my BFA in 1989) was very strong in traditional, perceptual training. (By the way, I did get what I call a “bi-polar” education. My mentor, Barry A. Rosenberg, in my four-year work-study job at the university gallery, was curating shows there of cutting edge New York art of the time.) Back to perceptual drawing… When you draw from life you are taught to make connections between things, horizontals lining up, verticals lining up, “feeling” with your graphite the line from you to the edge of that corner, then to this corner, etc. You are touching something far away from you by connecting seeing and the line on the paper. Same thing for connecting something in the mind faraway (like Rimbaud’s travelling eye in The Drunken Boat). Lines connect everything, lines can analyze form; it becomes like the imagination of microcosm and macrocosm of physics — everything is interconnected. Things flow or don’t; different states can be isolated and layered; diagrams suggest huge operations; the “Music of the Spheres”; sound can be shape; making the invisible visible; mark-making as language or code (and when it becomes communication, it triggers movement); etc, etc…

As a troubled adolescent I naturally drew what I found out later to be sigils. To draw is to make something accessible and it is the most direct thing to do. When the Plains Indians were locked up and given ledger books and accounting pencils, they drew what they had lost and sort of re-possessed for a moment what was taken away (American Indian Ledger Drawings). I see drawing as an extension of thought and it has fascinating principles. In kindergarten, a substitute teacher told us a story while drawing in front of us on the chalkboard and he magically made an “S” become two dimensional. That was a powerful visual moment for me. I watched my grandfather draw horses for me. When I draw an isometric or orthogonal projection it becomes another way to infer different states of being or appearance in space or time. All of these examples, for me, share an “extreme compaction of process and experience” into a line.

The analytical in my work gives me some distance and keeps me from being consumed. A diagram is a way to portray transference into another state of being. It distills and translates information.

I think part of what makes the work so absorbing to look at, is the complexity of how the “architectural” and the “intuitive” parts of the work play off each other. For example, in Above Angles in Clouds (for Antinous Bellori), there are several “architectural” structures that seem to organize the space, especially the tower(?) in the center. But then, in this painting there are also so many other layers of more ambiguous, “cloudlike” forms that make it much harder to “read” the space rationally, so it feels more like floating as you look at it. On top of that, there are other references to ponder; you mentioned Karl Ove Knausgaard’s book, A Time for Everything, and its main character, Antinous Bellori, as well as the Gaia principle. My question is how you manage all these different things, and achieve such unified complexity. I was intrigued by one comment you made: that whether drawing from life, or drawing the unseen connections among things, it’s still the same basic process. Is that an important clue for us to understand it?

Yes. And by the way, I love Krzysztof Kieślowski’s films. Underlying his vision is the interconnections, the coincidence of interconnections. It is not really surprising, it is the way it is and I am open to it.

I also wanted to ask about the importance of nature in your work. It might not be immediately obvious to someone who looks and sees first the more “architectural” elements and thinks: this work comes from the world of human-made constructions. The most clearly “natural” forms that I noticed were wave- and water-like shapes in Event Horizon and Blue Shift, as well as some of the cloud-like shapes elsewhere. However, you also mentioned a couple of vivid experiences of natural phenomena, such as a cloudburst that shows up in the OVS monotypes, and the experience of verdant green surrounding you at Effigy Mounds after a rainstorm. Could you talk about how experiencing nature like that, plays out in your work?

Perception and experience are important to me. The nature part goes back to what I said about being alone, playing in the woods and making friends with ants. But also I feel as an adult I need trees, plants, garden, being outside, being in nature. I also like urban cities. Charles Dee Mitchell once told me something like artists are just trying to make sense of the world. That is part of my world.