Colleen Asper

In History and Literary History: The Case of Mass Culture, Richard Ohmann gives a definition of mass media as "produced at a distance by strangers." Conversely, to a modern audience painting came to be seen as an act of great intimacy, lending the status of fraught personal drama to the history of this medium still. My work asserts the mutability of mass media texts—whether web content, the Oval Office, the evening news, or a witness box in a courtroom—by depicting these contexts in painting and placing myself within them.

In my recent work I have been building objects out of text that include Google’s logo and the sign-off an email. I then use these text-objects to produce not only paintings, but also photographs and videos. My interest in doing so is twofold: to connect the work I do as a writer to the work I do in my studio through material processes they both share, and to take texts that I encounter in a virtual space—text “produced at a distance by strangers”—and manipulate them through gross material means.

www.colleenasper.com

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“In Conversation: Judith Donath with Colleen Asper,” The Brooklyn Rail, Date: June 2008

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