Strip Narratives (1986-1987)
I used the photo novella or photo cartoon device in my work since 1986 as a means for creating complex, layered narratives that address the theoretical discourse surrounding women and representation. In these multiple paneled pieces, I examined lesbian sub-culture, and it’s relationship to mainstream language and metaphor. Money Is Time, Exchange Value and Inheritance Tax address the way economic metaphors permeate the most intimate levels of our lives. Phrases like: Emotional Investment, Giving more than I get, Is it worth it? or Spending time together, evaluate our relationships on a cost-effectiveness scale and pay off with the spectacle of romance. Owning Your Own, This Land Is Your Land and The Oldest Difference investigate the language of individualism and personal style. The characters in Owning Your Own try to balance their budget and imagine exotic vacations while sitting in a furniture showroom with price tags displayed. Against the backdrop of Monument Valley the two women in This Land Is Your Land look for traces of women’s desire or active characters in the western narrative.
In these pieces conversation is the subject rather than the means for moving the plot along. These narratives are fragments of conversations – uneventful, exploratory, repetitive and unresolved. They resist any narrative trajectory that would confirm cause and effect to keep the structure available for multiple entrance points. To further prevent singular readings, various strategies were employed to produce simultaneous narratives. The renaissance convention of a symbolic panel or the predella that is placed below the main narrative painting is employed to complicate the narrative dialogue and presents a children’s games or mundane tasks. Dialogue balloons and strips of narration both confirm and contradict or provide cross commentary on the narratives. Graphic arrows link points of connection in the parallel the workdays of the characters in Money Is Time and break the authority of the grid of panels, while the clocks indicate the progress of the day.
Following these explorations of individual economies, I turned to considering collective organizing and acts. In Another Triumph: The Reinvention of the Wheel, I consider the anarchist action and methods at an anti-nuclear action at the Nevada test site through the graphic device of an illustrated page of pictures with explanatory key. Contrasting the hyperbolic title with the factual language of the numbered picture key was a humorous way to monumentalize the invention of collective action and compare it to other human achievements such as the invention of the wheel. In We Sew, We Reap, We Repeat, I suggest that political activism is a necessarily repetitive activity. There is a cycle of protest and resistance that is ongoing.