Metronome Cocoon,1961-1995; 
mixed media assemblage; 14 x 5-1/2 x 7 in.

There is something mechanical about Bruce Conner's inkblot drawings. I believe it to be their fearful symmetry which, bolt upright or around the page, feels unnatural. What should be the most organic and fluid of all marks - the free flowing curve of ink on paper - becomes replicated across a fold, creating a precise crystalline spine. They do not sway breezily across their paper like the unruly vines of a garden plot, but throb with the stillness of hothouse orchids behind glass. The creases forming the central column of each of these totems are barely visible but ever palpable, diverting the viewer from relating to the drawing as an image, but instead as the document of a process, the memory of an action, the irrefutable record that this now flat plane was once a dimensional object; in short, as remains of something transformed, in the manner a wrinkled face testifies to a life lived.

They are also, of course, sly plays on the Rorschach test, for which the movie psychoanalyst turns to face the audience and asks "tell me what you see," hoping to reveal in the cloudy response to these non-objective smudges projected fears, fantasies, and neurosis. This is actually what Conner's iconic nylon clad assemblages have always done, but perhaps they pose the question differently than the drawings. "Tell me what you don't see" allows us to inject personal form and meaning into the half-images assuredly residing between and beneath the objects' fabric skin: at once silk, spider web, panty hose and the hoary copper coloring of another time, which might actually be the color of memory. And like the ordered remembrances of those inkblot conservatories, the assemblages reminds us that our histories and experiences, like our lives and relationships, need to be tended and honored, that there is nothing more tender, fleeting, meaningful, or momentous.

Bruce Conner: "Discovered" is on view at Gallery Paula Anglim in San Francisco through October 10, 2009.