Victoria Rabinowe - Artist Teacher Dreamer

THE MUSE IS IN THE MAIL
A Mail Art Correspondence

by

Victoria Rabinowe • Deborah Esperanza Zane • Gina D’Ambrosia

It has been very special getting to know you better,
having someone to share with these deeper wonderings on art and life.

How can they be separated?

Do we not, on every instant, express
that invisible energy that grounds and sustains us?

During the summer of 1993, Victoria Rabinowe of Santa Fe, Gina D’Ambrosio of San Antonio and I, Deborah Zane, AKA Deborah Hughes in San Diego, began a three way correspondence that included pictures, paintings and philosophical wonderings. As professional textile artists, we shared a common history in contemporary American artwear.

We met for a few days every year at The Santa Fe Weaving Gallery in New Mexico. During one visit, we conjured up the notion of a mail art correspondence, but we had no vision of how to proceed. After our visit, I continued on to Taos, N.M. I bought a picture postcard of an adobe church and attached two plastic pockets which I filled with mementos of my trip: a map depicting a three hour road delay and some grasses from the Taos landscape. I sent it to Victoria in Santa Fe. She then painted a whimsical watercolor map of her weekend on the banks of the Rio Grande River. She tore the map in half and sent one part to me and the other to Gina. Gina replied to both of us about her return to the studio using hand carved stamps to embellish her rambling letters. The ensuing cards were primarily visual, but many told a story. All invited a response. For five years, the three of us engaged in an ongoing journey of communication that delighted, instructed, challenged and called forth unexpected creative energies.

Unknowingly, we had joined a community of artists of international proportions that has grown steadily in numbers over the past four decades.
We discovered what other mail artists had already discovered: when we open to the creative genius in an other, the creative genius in ourselves responds in ways we might never have encountered alone. Collaboration invites us to journey on a road that discloses itself as we travel.

This correspondence with you both has been a major event.

So much has taken seed and developed almost magically.

There are changes taking place whose lines are not yet visible.

As a work in the round, the mail art correspondence between Victoria, Gina and me acted as a kind of group journal, both visual and verbal. It was an arena where we met to share work in progress and ideas germinating in our studios. Our work in surface design and woven cloth showed up as paper layered with collaged ephemera and scattered words revealing key issues which occupied us at the time.

Today I should have been testing dye for painting,
I should have been sewing back-orders,
but instead,
on paper,
I stitched threads,
and then stitched holes into patterns.

Our cards were a kind of creative thinking out loud shrunk into postcard format. Often one of us sent two similar pieces which triggered a different reaction in the other two. Each response became the seed for another card which was returned to our shared arena. In letting our ideas go, we found that they underwent a transformation through each other’s insights. We shared enrichment by stretching each others’ boundaries.

I have been fiddling with your little bag of design squares most of the week.
They have been wonderful teachers of black and white,
scale studies,
and probably more than anything,
they have been an exercise in entering into the spirit of another’s work and vision.
It was interesting to self observe the hesitancy to modify your images,
thinking it might prove a violation -
but once I got into it,
I found myself completely absorbed.

Besides the visual ideas, our mail art journal also documented the personal transitions we faced, the search for deeper meaning in our lives, and greater self-understanding. Gina’s postcard, Reaching into Darkness, echoed a common theme of our collaborative work by inviting the as yet unseen and undiscovered into our lives. We opened creatively and psychologically to change.

Technique is one thing,
but working on what’s inside
and getting it out there
is so important.

The correspondence is a study in methods and materials. As artists, we three are ever testing new tools and ways of conceiving images. Over the course of our correspondence we collectively explored printmaking techniques (silk screen, wood cuts, foam stamps, rubber stamps, air brushed stencils, monoprints, image transfer techniques (matte medium, gel, Polaroid, emulsion lifts, solvents) Xerography, paste paper, marbling, collage, montage, stitching, Shibori, vat dying, painting, photography and computer graphics. We learned a variety of artist book forms and developed skills with binding. Each new experiment found its way into our missives.

I did some Polaroid printing today.
Had some trouble with the transfer process.
This transfer makes me think of reality
as a skin that is stretched on energy,
but with tears in it.
Things are both real and not real,
here and not here,
manifest and not manifest.
The emulsion of the transfer is like an image skin;
when torn, it delivers us to another dimension.

Beyond the postcards of various sizes, we became involved with folded cards, letters, envelopes, mailing tubes, artists’ books and pop-ups. We tested the boundaries of the post office by sending an assortment of objects including a dish towel, a pot holder glove, a bag of popcorn, a straw hat and a beloved favorite - a bright red hot water bottle with an acrylic painted face.

The content of our correspondence was as varied as our lives, dreams and imagination. Themes emerged. Victoria’s and Gina’s love of mosaics created dozens of images.

MOSAIC MADNESS!!!

Is it boredom
that makes us sometimes shake up pieces of our lives
so that we can put them back in place again?

Maybe our lives are less like a puzzle than a mosaic -
we work on them for a while

and then stand back seeing things in a very different perspective

as the pieces mesh and blend together to make one whole!

There is a three way kimono series, linking us to our roots in textiles.

There is the hand series where hands recur drawn, photocopied, enlarged, reduced, stamped and printed.

My card is about hands -
reaching,
symbolic gestures,
directions,
going somewhere,
upwards,
reaching for that carrot
which in turn is food for thought,
good for your eyes to see -
more clearly your goals and directions.

Dreams weave through the correspondence, sometimes as story, sometimes as collage, sometimes as book. Victoria and I shared a snake dream dialogue for years, which continued to transform into new images like a snake molting its skin. In fact, the skins of my snake Kamala were incorporated into a number of mailed pieces.

Deborah’s Dream:

My snake Kamala is with me.

She is active.

I try to put her in a small bag with a zipper.

But she keeps pushing the zipper open with her nose,
trying to get out.

Victoria’s Dream:

My snake is starting to shed his skin.

Maybe he will write to Kamala.

I have never lived through a molting.

Sometimes the ordinary events of our lives developed themes, such as the final remodeling of Victoria’s house. One day I found in my mail box a square of disintegrating, lime green shag carpet from her old torn up bedroom. It was stamped and addressed on the threadbare underside. Weeks later, a square of the new teal carpet arrived. Another day, Victoria pulled the construction paper out from under the workers, plied it into layers, and with oil pastels she cartooned her story of the disasters of remodeling. She mused...

Is it a dream or a nightmare?

Our mail art collaboration was a labor of love. It was never intended for publication. The collaboration issued from a sincere desire to share and explore. There was no superimposed structure on the exchange. We simply followed a journey that had its own destiny as we released our work through the postal system. We felt the desire to experience letting go as a spiritual exercise for the ego to let go of control in the world. As a result, some pieces vanished forever, many of them arrived marked by their journey. With passage through the postal system, the mailed artworks underwent a kind of consecration.

About the subject of quietude....
Is it not always the same?

What to get rid of?

In art too...
get rid of the unnecessary.

Let go, let go, let go.

Detach from it and we are at rest.

This experience enriched us greatly. To give birth to ideas unburdened by their utilitarian purpose was simply joyous. It gave us the opportunity to express nonsense and to revel in the foolish, absolute joy of play. Letters, notes and cards were created with no other intention than to surprise and delight, or to baffle our ordinary sense of the world. We scrambled the seriousness of our daily concerns, transforming them into absurdities, like a kaleidoscope that magically, spontaneously and everlastingly rearranges itself into new patterns.

MOSAICS

The repetition of units
each with its own peculiarities
moments passing across stepping stones
introspection and time

I look up

and I don’t know where I’ve been...
or why.