Linda French (USA)
Beach Music / Bowl and Frog / Subterranean Doodad
The envelope containing the mailarts prepared by Linda French for the call is full of colored sheets, and here I come once in a translation problem: I would use the word "campitura" to indicate a concept that I can not translate into English from Italian, I can get close to it only by approximation, I could say hues, shades, fill type and trasparency level, plot below the covering color… but I'm pretty sure I will not make know perfectly the idea.
The window of clear plastic in the envelope which should correspond to the address of the recipient is covered with an additional color crafting, it might seem a graph, a double electroencephalogram in red and purple. Inside the envelope there are three mailarts of the playing cards' sizes.
The first artwork, dated 2013, is titled "Beach Music". It's a web of lines and spaces in black and white, in a sort of winding path and moves without too many sharp corners; the concentric movements delimit spaces filled from different weavings.
The second artwork, dated April 2015, is titled "Bowl and Frog". Under the text print "odd juxtaposition" we find a US postage stamp, depicting a frog of the species "ornate chorus", and just below it a bowl from the stretch sketched, cut out and painted blue. I do not know why, but I had immediately an oriental impression, caming to my mind those zen koan that serve to defuse the traps of logical and channeled way of thinking, in paths preconceived.
The third artwork, dated May 2015, resumed coincidentally my translation difficulties about which I wrote above; it is titled "Subterranean Doodad", and I can not find an italian word to translate the concept of "doodad", if not, perhaps, the concept of "kipple" expressed by P. Dick in his science fiction novels. The mailart presents layering of colored cardboard, dashed to look like rocky patterns, but also perhaps boundaries or topography and elevationt lines; in the background there is a stripe of a glittering green, and in the center of the composition there is a sort of circular little plastic gear, perforated, as the green stripe in the background. The plastic element in a subterranean natural transforms the composition in a sort of search path, between different meanings and possible interpretations in line with the other two mailarts sent.
