Poetry in Motion

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2005 by Yau, John

The prints define a world in ceaseless flux. Impossible to comprehend in one glance, they compel us to repeatedly adjust and refocus our attention. We are asked to do the impossible: to pay attention to everything while the best we can do is be attentive to merely a portion of these complex visual structures. Conner subverts the formalist ideal of engaging a work all at once, as exemplified by Frank Stella's monochrome paintings, by defining the act of looking as something that is limited and continually shifting. Echoing Heraclitus' dictum about the forever changing state of nature, Conner's lithographs seem as if they are animated by a life force, their surfaces swarming with entities. The relationship is never hierarchical between the areas marked by drawing and the ones that aren't. As soon as we discern that the unmarked area is delineating the marks, our perception changes and negative space becomes active. This constant retinal play is a scientific phenomenon known as "persistence of vision." About this phenomenon, Conner has stated:

The motion picture has twenty-four different pictures in a second. In between each of them, the screen is black. And by retaining that image from one picture to another, your eye experiences the illusion of motion, whereas it is in actuality a series of still photographs. It has a stroboscopic effect. The stroboscope creates patterns and colors by interference with the brain waves. Whenever you look at any black-and-white or almost any contrasting image, a certain amount ofthat impression is kept in the retina of the eyeball. Look at a bright light and look away, and you see the negative image of it. So, as almost an analogy with photography, the eye is continually registering images, both positive and negative.6

While Conner is talking about film and photography, it is clear that he put his knowledge of this scientific phenomenon into the drawings and prints. Various means are used to create the illusion of motion, among them: shifting, rhythmic fields of dense, abstract patterning; the interplay between positive and negative; and the use of white to generate a stroboscopic-like effect. The retinal afterimage, that is the result of the fast changing contrast between black-and-white, causes the image to appear to be moving-an effect that is both compelling and disconcerting.

Both the felt tip pen drawings and offset lithographs dissolve the figure/ground relationship, as well as become an unending engagement between black and white, darkness and light. Like Gnostic charts, many of the ones incorporating a Mandala can be read as hermetic maps of the universe. They bring to mind the illustrations one finds in Utriusque Cosmi, Volume 1 (1617) by Robert Fludd (1574-1638). Fludd presented sixteen Mandala-like structures, circles within circles, each of which detailed a stage of Genesis. Deeply knowledgeable about many arcane branches of philosophical speculation, the artist is able to evoke these associations by underscoring the formal relation of the graphic mark to its surrounding space. We see both formally rigorous drawing and an engagement between light and dark, and all the associations their encounter evokes. It is not the literal symbolism that he is necessarily interested in, but the relationship between a structure and its surroundings, form and chaos.