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J Pasila's photographs could resemble the documentation of a forgotten post-minimal figure with their meditative vacancies and interrogation of her work environment as if searching for clues on how to proceed. For Pasila, the camera is an organizing device that relocates peripheries to the center and elevates the surfaces of host materials, paper specifically, to the status of subject. The studio (soon to be condensed within any hand held device) often attracts the artist's attention during the self-imposed periods of isolation necessary to the making of art. In a recent interview, the painting conceptualist Mel Bochner mentioned the desire to learn, or take away something from his daily studio regimen, even if the time invested produces nothing to show. Pasila's images may illustrate this restless mental space.
The organizational chores that attend any career may replicate the administrative dimension of Fluxus or Conceptual art, as manual labor is necessary to the procedures of artists who navigate lead sheets against walls. Pasila's physical inspections of marginalia in her own body of work results in a hall of mirrors type visual recycling of discrete events. Images of touch and insertion harbor a distinct erotic pull, choosing the pleasures of the disappearing stationery store (a museum of blankness) over the lurid Warholian newsstand. Pasila's recent piece at the Tulca Festival (Galway, Ireland ) spectacularizes such a single interaction. As the print world accelerates toward the paper-free screen, could J Pasila's art signal nostalgia for not only the cluttered bibliophilic archive but for the unrequited intimacy between us and all things stacked, leaning, or affixed?
Tim Maul Image Editor