As a grammar school student, artist Raye Bemis would return a creased piece of paper to the teacher and request a perfect sheet. “The pristine surface was my starting point,” she explains, “and something on it would somehow interfere with my taking crayon to the surface. The blank piece of paper represented the unknown in a way, and that’s what I seek today; that’s why I avoid art history references or anything that feels like I’ve experienced it before.”
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“I’m doing something that I don’t think language is adequate to describe,” says Bemis, whose untitled grid of 291 beeswax panels is now on exhibit at Fassbender Stevens. “One of the reasons that art is so conceptual now is that in the university system they’re brewing artists and art criticism in the same vat. You know that if you’re going to have a career in art you need to be written about, and you have to appeal to the writer’s sense of language. I think most of it is fueled by caffeine, which stimulates the language part of the brain, which kicks in with too much thinking in too many directions. Caffeine is also my drug of choice, but for 20 years I’ve been involved with tai chi, and so I experience culture less cerebrally. I like work that strikes on a subliminal level; whenever I can pare something down to the bare minimum it makes me happy.”
In the mid-60s Bemis won a scholarship to the School of the Art Institute, but she was dissatisfied there–it was smaller and more traditional then than today. With the exception of professor Tom Mapp, Bemis says she “didn’t get any stimulus or guidance from the teachers.” She was also dissatisfied with much contemporary painting: “I felt the image was this cheesy thin layer on top of something else more substantial–the stretcher and the canvas.”
Like the Rockford installation, it was affected by the surrounding architecture. “At Fassbender Stevens there’s an expansion joint in the concrete floor and the piece is keyed off that,” Bemis says. So she extended the line of the floor gap with a break between the tiles. Though affected by the flatness of the lake and prairie in general, Bemis rejects the suggestion that the organic materials and undulating forms she uses consciously emulate nature. But she hopes viewers of her piece “will have a similar wordless response to the one I have looking at the lake.”
