As historians, we are bound by documents; as art historians, we are further tied to material objects. While both are crucial, neither are sufficient in predicting (or explaining) stylistic outcomes; furthermore, visual styles reflect rhetorical aesthetic goals only awkwardly and with much "reading in." In some sense, both visual and verbal discourses pale as causal or explanatory motivations, next to the ephemeral field of practice, where desires are acted upon, decisions made, accidents permitted, objects produced.
Caroline A. Jones 1
Space that has been seized upon by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor.
Gaston Bachelard 2
An entrance is a crossing-into, the passing through of a liminal zone, a threshold. One makes an entrance, into a physical space, and metaphorically into the practice of the enterprise of the artist, as George Kubler noted. 3 An entrance entails a radical historicity, occurring at a specific time within a long tradition. Because an entry occurs at a specific time, its duration is limited, notwithstanding such perduring resonance it may have. One might propose that the notion of an entry is analogous to Nietzsche's notion of the Augenblick, the gate of the Now entailing at once retention and protention. 4
Jagers' two paintings on the front wall of the gallery are antecedent to the prints within the gallery, by their placement marking physically a particular moment of entrance into the practice of the enterprise. The facture of the paintings employs digitally abstracted images of architectural space. The prints combine this means of introducing the affective memory of architectural space, incorporated as polymer plate lithographs images from the digital file using a laser printer, with overprinted chirographic intaglio plates. Thus the prints layer indexical signs produced by imaging light on a photosensitive material (subsequently digitally manipulated and printed as a lithograph) and indexical signs produced by the hand in movement (mediated by the syntax inherent in a particular marking instrument, materials and processes, as inflected by the agency of the artist). A salient feature of both of thee sign systems is their indexicality: the sign is a record of the physical processs and forces entailed in the facture of the signifier.5 Notwithstanding their common indexicality, photographic-including the digital and printmaking extentions of the photographic-sign systems necessarily retains an imprint of the effect of light reflected from a surface, however attenuated the contiguity of imprint is, while chirographic sign systems do not necessarily entail an imprint of light reflected from a surface (though of course they may entail the production of an illusion of so doing). In Jagers prints, the chirographic elements are generally more prominent, and are more evident as such, than the non-chirographic elements, which are present as a trace of their referent and forming a contrapunctal, dialogical syntax. An aspect of that dialogue is the sublation of chirographic presence as indexical trace and the indexical preentness of digital syntax into a species of the technological sublime. 6
The introduction of collaged elements by chine collé into many of the prints renders the space of the images more complex still. This additional level of complexity is threefold. First, as with any collage process-with the significant exception of more or less transparent layers, most commonly encountered in collage within digital images-the addition of the collaged element conceals the ground onto which the collaged element is superimposed. The introduction of the new, collaged, element is both a matter of difference and of absence; the introduction of figure qua collage element equiprimordially asserts and denies the ground. 7 Second, the collaged element brings its own spatial microcosm to be embedded into the macrocosm of the image field, quoting another spatial structure within the larger spatial structure into which it is introduced. 8 Third, the edges of the collaged elements serve as directional lines within the larger spatial field.
Like the antecedent paintings, the prints engage the function of perception and memory in the the lived experience of space, and in the visual representation of that experience. As the paintings mark a moment of entrance into practice of the enterprise, so the prints project that entrance forward.
Christopher Jagers received the Bachelor of Fine Arts from Southern Methodist University, and the Master of Fine Arts from the University of Washington, Seattle. He is a UTD-Southside Residency Fellow, and an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, Southern Methodist University and, Brookhaven College School of the Arts. Recent exhibitions include: Painting Attack, Dallas Contemporary, 2005; Drawn For, Barry Whistler Gallery, 2004; Altered States, The University of Texas at Dallas, 2004, 5th Annual Painters Competition, Miami University, Ohio, 2003.