Ruth Weisberg Essay
#9 Vonn Sumner (Visiting Painting)
#10 Ruth Weisberg (Response Painting)
This exhibition seems to have been conceived as a kind of exquisite corpse or what we called Rumor when I was growing up in Chicago. In pursuit of Truth, we are only allowed to see one link, one small part of the larger puzzle. The Surrealists who invented the game of Exquisite Corpse hoped that a mysterious and only partially revealed prompt would provide access to the unconscious and encourage great leaps of the imagination. I trust that on this occasion too the way we have been invited to discover our truth will have a similar effect.
My prompt was a painting, very geometric in its design and rigorous in execution, that suggested the deconstruction of the globe. My aesthetic is quite different. Where my unknown partner represented the globe as opaque and constructed from shifting tectonic plates, I have favored transparency and fluidity in combination with the expressive gesture of a pair of generous hands. The abstraction of the globe seen from afar suggested to me the fundamental presence which underpins our world. In my view the universe is both more shifting and ephemeral and at the same time more timeless and eternal. This is my paradoxical truth.