AprèsDistillé (2022)
AprèsDistillé is an artist book that is a postscript to the ten-year exhibition history of my multi-media project Distillé. Rather than summarizing Distillé, the book instead focuses on images and a personal text that articulate my increased awareness of how I look at the world and how I transform the everyday through my work. In making and remaking Distillé, I deeply explored these core aspects of my practice through my engagement with Gustave Flaubert, whose novel Madame Bovary served as the root of Distillé. In this way, AprèsDistillé looks back at a decade of intense work, and also looks ahead through the lens of my evolving sensibilities. I’ve chosen to have my text translated into French, Italian and Japanese, all languages that I engaged with during the various
iterations of Distillé.
Autobiography of Looking
Sandra Binion
To look back, beyond and into the pieces from which another world is revealed. Curious. Engaging. Magnificent. Looking into ancient mirrors with worn edges and pale reflections. The pleasure of clues. To wonder about wondering. Exploring the limits of soft explosions. Tracking breaths breathed. Sage exhalations but no formulas for reconciliation. The thrill of menace. Testing the boundaries of attraction and danger. The soft suggestion of pattern. Markings made by moisture. Metallic matter seeps into itself creating edges like shorelines. A pink haze formed by rotting leaves on a watery surface. A reflected embrace of bare branches giving form to the idea of what happens when the brain relaxes and can appreciate its own intricacy and purpose to regard and decipher. A crust between melting and freezing. Holding at that temperature both possibilities. A cinematic mood. A place where night consumes flowers lit by headlights—approaching, turning. To catch these moments in an eyeful. The path of a sunrise on a crisp morning. Is this a moment between the lines? Fading ornamentation even more obscured by additional white brushstrokes. Clinging to the most subtle. Barely able to cling. To encounter the artificial as so extraordinarily real that it is impossible to judge as fakery. Caught in a forever moment if one is moved to languorous intimacy while trying to explain. Suspended pages turned by invisible hands. An illuminated celebration beneath splotches—both reward and downside for forcing a vision that examines perhaps too closely. A hallucination. The moment before a storm hits.