What You Are Seeing Is The Ashes Of The Deceased In A Portrait
An excerpt of the chapter “Dead Talk” by George Quasha, from Icons in Ash, a collaborative conceptual artist’s book, culminated by founder Heide Hatry.
Art seems to make every effort it can get beyond death. Yet it can rarely leave death alone for long. Obviously there’s a strong mix, a witch’s brew, which gets our attention whenever the dark story slips back into view. The occasion here is a unique one speaking to an artists’ life like portrait crafted with the ashes of the dead. This is not a matter that falls easily within my comfort zone and that helped convince me to accept its interesting challenge. My intention accordingly is to lay the matter bear in writing, as far as I can, and in a way that brings alive the bite of the issue - the dead who are by art so risen.
To put it more simply, this is an experiment, by way of grasping the real matter, so difficult to name, to see if I can perform in language, not an equivalent of what the artist is doing in the particular act art act of portraiture, but a telling simulacrum. I would characterize this the “real matter” as inter-incursion with the dead. Some part of such an act does not properly belong to the apparent maker. The artist is the apparent maker of the portrait series in question, just as I am the apparent maker of this text. If you look at any of the artist portraits you might focus on the life like photographically precise face of the person deceased.
A living observer naturally sees a living image whenever possible the fact that it is so to speak a vision from beyond the tomb is not a visual fact as such but it is a conceptual one perhaps also an experimental one. At some point you become aware that you are looking at a rather vibrant dead person, and, further, that what you are seeing is constituted by the actual ashes of the deceased person in the portrait. That fact changes everything in your mind. Nevertheless, your eyes have a life of their own just as the image has a life of its own eyes gaze upon a person’s portrait and conveys the person’s life.