Valerie Constantino Lecture: "Crossing Sublime (After After Nature)"

Photo by Sean Hong

     I attended Valerie Constantino's lecture on her Crossing Sublime (After After Nature) exhibit, on February 7th.  Constantino teaches at California State University, Sacramento and American River College.  Her lecture was formatted in a manner in which she shared the history of her old work and the investigation she was pursuing in Crossing Sublime (After After Nature).

"I've struggled all my life to get the maximum meaning in the simplest form."

-Anne Truitt

     Valerie Constantino spoke about her influences, most of which she finds in reading works by writers who "spend time outside."  She also brought up the quote above by American artist Anne Truitt because it touches on what Constantino is pursuing in the work she creates.  "Reductive abstraction" are the words she used to describe it.  She also mentioned her process involves "listening" to what needs to be done rather than the desire to do.

     The "language" of textile became Constantino's source material.  She said she sees the material as related to time; a four-dimensional object.  It's challenging for me to understand what she means by that because I'm solely a two-dimensional artist.  With Crossing Sublime, Constantino used W.G. Sebald's narrative poem After Nature to draw inspiration from.  In her lecture, she mentioned that besides producing work in the persona of Anne Ryan and Valentina Tereshkova, the last character is an aspect of herself.  It's the part of herself observing the world and having a sense of things being illusory, while trying to make a connection to those things.  I think this is an aspect of ourselves that we all certainly have in common.