About the Work:
I am a maker of things and a depicter of things. Paint, canvas and the rectilinear format are slippery to me - they are the tools of deceptions and illusions, and the means through which illusion may be dismantled. My work inhabits the space between the two where conflict is inherent; where the need to represent tangles with the immediacy and formal language of the materials.
Sometimes a commonality is found where the making and the depicting serve each other. For instance, the chalkboard paintings, while solidly representational, are made with the tools and gestures of the action painters, and are therefore wholly material. Like a pun, the material is a signifier that oscillates between being wholly what it depicts and asserting itself as arbitrarily connected to that which it depicts. Within the painting exists the simultaneity of these two facts.
Paintings that are split in their motivation fail to communicate directly. The viewer is left with two face-values, the painting as illusion or the painting as material, and a meaning that is fugitive. I became interested in this phenomenon while working on the Nancy Drew cover series. The figure of Nancy does not fully participate within the picture plane, yet she is illusionistic. She is what Monika Szewczyk calls a blank or a place of incommunicability in Drawing the Blank. The ambiguity of the non-communicable space strikes me as not only as resonant in the world, but as something that should be recognized and discussed rather than filled. I am sustained by the mystery and the possibility this presents in my studio.
About the Nancy Drew Paintings:
"...It is increasingly necessary to recognize the existence of small pockets of non-communication or un-communicability which I will call blanks." (Monika Szewczyk, from Drawing the Blank)
Essayist Monika Szewczyk speaks of the blank as almost a free agent in the context of power-neither inherently good nor bad, but a zone that does not communicate. In the literature of adolescent girls, it seems that the protagonists, no matter how much virtue or empowerment is compiled upon them, are at their core without characterization. This is a type that functions one dimensionally; a device through which an idea of femininity is communicated. As a painter, my intent was to explore something that I felt had psychological weight through a medium that has its own gravity and assumptions. Under different authors, characters such as Nancy Drew shift from figures of empowerment, to the unthreatening girl-next-door, to an object for viewing. It seemed natural to take a turn at authorship myself in order to find a way to exist with these enigmas of femininity. Reiterating these illustrations in a loose painterly manner (one that is almost violent at times), or leaving an empty space separates the subject from the intent with which it was rendered. This is where the blank (as a space of non-communication) enters, or perhaps just rises to the surface. It is important for me not to look for an antidote or a solution, but to uncover the blank and hold it open.
Eleanor Aldrich grew up in the mountains of Arizona . She attended Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, and the Academie Minerva in the Netherlands. She has lived many places, including Alaska and the United Kingdom. More recently, she has taught drawing at Northern Arizona University. Eleanor is currently a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.