Artist Statement
". . . other levels of madness" of Kerouac, conversation and the
exquisite corpse presents new work by Maxine Farkas, Steve Syverson and Gay Tracy. Inspired by a sense of the absurd, the trio look at Kerouac's On the Road with a surrealist eye.
As played by the surrealists, the exquisite corpse is an exercise in
imagination and the nature of chance. In the original game, one artist
would start a drawing, then fold the drawing until only a small portion
remained visible and pass the drawing on to the next player who would do
the same . . . the game would continue until there was no paper left and
only then would the whole drawing be revealed.
This variation of the exquisite corpse, played by a sculptor and two
painters has slightly different rules. Three phrases from On the Road
were chosen as the inspiration for three triptychs, each artist created
the center portion of a triptych, chose a size and shape for the
finished set of three and chose a series of connection points for the
work on either side of theirs. Each worked in isolation and did not
have any information about what the others were doing. Only one of the
triptychs was assembled (for the postcard image) prior to the
installation of the exhibit, the other two remained a mystery to the
artists until they were hung side by side in the Ayer Lofts Gallery.
While the triptychs are the main focus, other new works by the three were
presented in this exhibit which ran at the Ayer Lofts from August
2 - 26.