Working across mediums of video, drawing, painting, performance, kinetic sculpture, and writing, Steffani Jemison considers the byproducts that arise from the confluence of drawing, movement, gesture, and vernacular culture. Her works illustrate the limits and applications of language by imagining coded and formal modes of representation, revealing the intrinsic tensions that suffuse layers of improvisation, repetition, and ideas of progression. Jemison’s new Untitled (Rough Projection) works are made from found glass that has been handsilvered in her studio. The silver is then selectively removed through scratching and etching, and embellished with marks made by hand and brush. The works are inspired by a type of basalt colloquially called “Chinese writing stone.” It is derived from minerals that interact with igneous rock to form marks that resemble white glyphs on a black chalkboard. Chinese writing stone is found in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California and in the Yangtze River Valley of Hunan Province, China. Jemison obtained rough stone slabs, scanned them, and isolated individual glyphs using simple AI tools built into imaging software to create very large images using a small sample. In the case of Chinese writing stone, these patterns resemble repeated glyphs, which are a starting point for the drawing compositions in these five works. They emphasize a set of marks Jemison found frequently in the stone, which resemble these roman glyphs: >, 7, /, L, I, . Rather than transcribe or map, the Untitled (Rough Projection) works share with diagrams a sense of inbetweenness. By tracing the margins of language and drawing as they relate to abstract forms and landscapes, the works forge new forms of communication.
