Elizabeth Ferrer Essay
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Think, for instance, of Queen of My Room II, a painting from 1998. In it, a young woman faces the viewer. She stands in a room that could induce claustrophobia in just about anyone—but, if barely large enough to contain its subject, it provides ample space for the profusion of markings visible on every wall. Such obsessively painted cryptogram-like forms reflect a device that Speed has used in many compositions of persons set in interiors. "I like to think of the surfaces as walls that some obsessed, imprisoned, or inspired person writes on with chalk or scratches onto," she notes.
Various works have contained a range of symbols—domino scoring marks, Roman numerals, fake math and science formulas, made-up cuneiform, poetry (Speed's own), repeated lines of geometric forms, and, as she has described it, "crazy-person code writing." In Queen of My Room II, we find a dense grid of lines, minute hatch marks, circles, arrows, and words, the latter spelling out a poem Speed wrote in 1995, "Queen of My Room." The protagonist — a defiant-looking woman wearing a delicate tiara — has just flung a piece of chalk out of her hand. Depicted in sharp focus, the chalk appears to be suspended in space. Speed has frozen time for just an instant here, giving her protagonist a chance to consider her next move, and giving the viewer a space to put the perplexities of life into perspective.
Another way that Speed Time manifests itself is in the disjunctive quality of many of her narratives. Often, her subjects seem unaware, or unwilling to recognize, the events taking place just outside their closed-in worlds, as if they were experiencing some sort of temporal or spatial dislocation. In The Burning Boat (2000), two female figures obsessively concentrate on their card game even though a small boat, mysteriously pilotless, is being engulfed in flames outside.
Likewise, in Sleeper (2000), a woman and her pet baboon pose placidly, wholly unaware of or unconcerned about the spewing volcano signaling impending doom visible through the window behind them. One rare exception to this theme is Damage (2002), showing a clearly stunned figure turned to face the viewer while a harrowing scene of desperate jumpers is visible in the slice of sky visible outside the window. Clearly inspired by the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York, this painting suggests that not even a lunatic could avoid the psychic damage caused by such horror.
Ironically, working with the traditional media of oil paint and canvas has functioned as Speed's own form of artistic experimentation, because instruction in the technical aspects of oil painting was not offered at the art school she attended in the late 1960's. Teachers, she noted, expected students to paint large abstract canvases, with only a modicum of importance placed on technique, or to experiment with various conceptual modes of art making. One instructor even told Speed that she belonged back in the seventeenth century, suggesting that progressive artists should stick with a limited range of acceptable media and approaches.