Gallery Adler featuring Rachel Howe

Rachel Howe - Text

Artist Statements

I use stylized visual clues from violent music subcultures and revolutionary movements to reflect a universal conflict between an interior, inexpressible mournfulness and the aggressive ways that it ends up being articulated: sadness transmuted into anger. My sources are largely magazines, both for images and for background on the cultures. I make collages as a thinking process, to literally combine acceptable and unacceptable modes of expression, but they don’t function as studies for the drawings. The drawings are more spontaneous outbursts that follow connections made earlier, and I am mindful of preserving the physical presence of this spontaneity. In my drawings, there are both multiples and absences of communicating signs. Specific clothing, fonts, hostile poses, and other icons and symbols function as familiar and automatic identifying signals. The multiplicity of the body fragments, and the addition of a weapon in the hands, work to be overpowering gestures, however, there are essential human identifying traits that are missing: individual features, facial expressions, a place, a context. The drawing is still a portrait of reality, albeit an emotional reality.

This ghost that runs after you, my brother, is more
beautiful than you; why do you not give him your flesh
and your bones?

Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus spoke Zarathustra

He has a boy inside who is already dead. He cannot recognize this ghost that he carries around in his body, but he feels death close to him all the time. Or, he thinks, he is being haunted by someone.

He wants to detach himself from his death-twin, but there is no way to change the past. You can die, but you can’t never be born. Youth is power, so he immerses himself in teenage death-love, in symbols of aggression and violence, not out of nihilistic boredom, but for survival, to try to live outside of the traumatic disappointments that his passing through time brings. His fear of this compulsion to see himself dead, buried deep in the heart of ghost, allows him to feel his desires, reducing all motivations to an action either for death or against it.

Revenge is like a haunting, it implies repetition, reoccurence. To return to the past to the present it must be brought back from the death, and with it comes an endless continuation of mourning. A constant dark veil of sadness; a crushing glacier of memories of irreversible actions.