How to Draw Clouds
(Maastricht / Boschstraat 47)
Salise Hughes (united States) takes a keen interest in the essence of change, in how to capture what is fleeting. Since 2005 she has been experimenting with found footage and she includes the ‘found’ material in her own narrative and edits it into short videos. In How to Draw Clouds as a present-day impressionist she makes an attempt to record a moving cloud with a drawing pen. The hand-painted animations move across existing images. Hughes touchingly shows her desire to make material what is not solid matter.
The drawing indirectly hints at its place within contemporary art and the overall tradition of nature drawing. It is clear that to the artist drawing is a meditative act. She claims to be inspired by the technique of painting over that Max Ernst as one of the very first artists applied in his collages at the start of the 20th century. The idea of making new things by destroying or reusing images is a recurring theme in Hughes’ films. Could this be a secret wish to invert the process of decay?