MARK C. STEVENSON
UPON further
REFLECTION
MEMORY • A NARRATIVE ACCUMULATION
Upon Further Reflection is an installation that explores how memory functions more like oral tradition than written record: a story reshaped by each retelling in response to current experience. The work attempts to embody that process rather than illustrate it.
The work consists of seven 48 × 60-inch paintings suspended at eye hight to form an inward-facing circle. Visitors enter through gaps between the paintings.
THE PAINTINGS: Past/Present/Future
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Process is at the heart of the series. Each painting is a reflection of those that come before and after. This is achieved by following three simple but strict rules:
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Each painting begins by repeating, in order, every technique that produced the paintings before it.
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Thinking ‘This might be done’ means work stops and any new ideas become the start of the next painting.
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Previous paintings can never be changed.
Under these rules, each painting becomes a record of the forces shaping it. Techniques are repeated but never replicated, because familiarity with the subject and knowledge of what comes next change how each step is carried out. Painting Four, for example, scrubs the dog from a monochromatic ground, repeats the white marks and thin wash of Paintings Two and Three, then adds new hues and impasto (the new idea). Knowing the wash is coming changes how values are handled in the first step. Each painting carries traces of every earlier one while remaining distinct.
And, like time, a finished canvas can never be revised: each new idea means a new painting, not an update, just as each experience triggers a reassembly of prior recollections to make sense of the present.
THE INSTALLATION: A Circle of Equal Parts
Seven paintings suspended at eye level form an inward-facing circle.
From the outside, the viewer encounters the installation as a single constructed object composed of apparently equivalent parts. Exposed canvas backs, stretcher bars, and the suspension structure remain visible, emphasizing the work’s physical construction.
Entering through one of the gaps changes that understanding. The paintings become individual images: accumulated versions of the same remembered subject. Their differences reveal the iterative process through which they were made and invite the viewer to look for an organizing sequence. But the circular arrangement provides no privileged entry point, and the chronology ultimately returns to itself.
At its most literal, the installation is a group of paintings made through a defined process. It is also a system that suggests there is no fixed beginning or end.
CONCLUSION
The tension between sequence and circle remains unresolved by design: paintings that must be read as a sequence within an installation that refuses to let that sequence hold together. The viewer stands in the gap between the two, confronted by what Melville calls the ungraspable phantom of life.
Upon Further Reflection is an installation that explores how memory functions more like oral tradition than written record: a story reshaped by each retelling in response to current experience. The work attempts to embody that process rather than illustrate it.
Process is at the heart of the series. Each painting is a reflection of those that come before and after. This is achieved by following three simple but strict rules:
-
Each painting begins by repeating, in order, every technique that produced the paintings before it.
-
Thinking ‘This might be done’ means work stops and any new ideas become the start of the next painting.
-
Previous paintings can never be changed.
Under these rules, each painting becomes a record of the forces shaping it. Techniques are repeated but never replicated, because familiarity with the subject and knowledge of what comes next change how each step is carried out. Painting Four, for example, scrubs the dog from a monochromatic ground, repeats the white marks and thin wash of Paintings Two and Three, then adds new hues and impasto (the new idea). Knowing the wash is coming changes how values are handled in the first step. Each painting carries traces of every earlier one while remaining distinct.
And, like time, a finished canvas can never be revised: each new idea means a new painting, not an update, just as each experience triggers a reassembly of prior recollections to make sense of the present.