Cullet and Pitch

Cullet and Pitch is a celebration of the discarded, the fragmentary, and the discordant. It is a rejection of the myth of the individual artist and of the singular interpretation. The pieces bring together remnants of other artist’s work, both in material form—Christine Garvey’s discarded cut out canvases, Rehab El Sadek’s discarded wallpaper and faux marble liner, a UT student’s discarded shaped canvases—and in image form—the composition of La Mujer Barbuda by Jusepe de Ribera, tapestries from my grandmother’s house, The Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini, a compositional still taken from a film of a cleaning service in Freud’s office. These found images and materials act, in unmeasured parts, as catalysts for creation. This unification disregards the separation between idea and material and forces a link between a singular artist’s work and those around them.

By rejecting—in private artistic practice—the conflict between the seemingly irreconcilable, this body of work expresses the validity of disparate modes of understanding. Faith and research, the conceptual and the formal, the discrete and the continuous, the lawless and the controlled, intention and chance, the artist and their network, all coexist without conflict. Time and transformation become highlighted, as is decomposition, loss, and regeneration. It suggests that this assemblage, this orchestration, is simply a set of parentheses whose reason for being is impossibly murky.

It is an affirmation of missing links, a call to relinquish clarity and bask in the things that are incommunicable.