Denise Bergman
Artist Statement
Danglers
Danglers are 3-D hanging paper structures.
I paint each side of a Bristol board sheet with a different color, wield the exacto blade and cut, unfold/fold, cut, glue on shapes of photographed textures and patterns or solid-color paper, cut/fold/unfold/glue….
The Dangler revolves at eye level suspended from a thread.
What happens
Shape, space, and detail grow, resisting narrative. Defying narrative. Dissolving it.
The Dangler turns continuously, reassembling the composition.
Each rotation is a reinvention, a possibility. Unpredictable. Each rotation invites then negates our assumptions of what comes next. We relinquish expectation.
Colors, shapes, spaces, overlays and overlaps, textures and patterns turn quickly, turn slowly. The Danger’s countless views appear and disappear—no recto or verso, no front or back, no singular “other side.”
Shape and space, color and texture, sudden and continuous connections teeter between presence and disappearance, assumption and surprise.
We never experience the same view twice. Each view comes and goes before you know it.
Light, angle, speed, spin, shadow.
Danglers are constantly moving—from the slightest air current, breath of an empty room, turn of a head.
What excites me in the making
The urgent initial gesture that invites the Dangler’s shapes, colors, elements, mood.
Who I am when constructing impermanence.
The what-if conversation with an object that can’t sit still.
The textures and patterns that find and photograph to use as snippets, connectors, advisors, influencers.
The stable rendered unstable.
Time
The Danglers are also about time. Time. Time cued in circular movement.
(Time could be listed as a material in the Dangler’s wall label.)
Dangler time, nonlinear, unpredictable, always moving, wears a new costume each rotation.
As what we see immediately replaces what we saw, memory is challenged. Each view carries away the imprint of its past along with our interaction with its past.
Moving or held still, the Dangler’s past and future converge, disappear, reappear in consecutive present moments.
A Dangler is a souvenir, a reminder, a keepsake of unstable time.
Time that suspends from a thread.
Poetry and Danglers
In the 1970s and early 1980s I was a painter. Exhibited paintings in group shows. Taught figure drawing at Mass Art Adult Ed and drawing at the Boston Architectural Center. After a solo exhibit at the Bromfield Gallery, creativity shape-shifted and I moved from visual art to writing poetry. In 2022 I began making Danglers, 3-D hanging paper structures, in addition to writing.
I am the author of five published books of poetry, each with a single subject. Each book/story takes place within a defined time period as it unfolds, digs into, uncovers a hidden or unknown story or event. In my books, as in many of my individual poems, time sits within a frame, like a scene in a snapshot. You the viewer, the reader, step inside this bracket of time, look around, position and reposition your preconceptions and discoveries.
The interlocking themes of “time” and “what’s hidden” provide me with endless provocations, excitements, motivations, complexities. I amfortunate to be conversing with them in simple and elegant 3-dimensional materials.