Ingrid Calame: Being Born

I don’t remember but…Ingrid Calame interviewed more than 20 people, among them children, adolescents, adults, friends and colleagues, female as well as male, in her volume Being Born about what they knew about their own birth. These naturally immensely personal conversations are accompanied by details of frottages with pigment on Mylar, which the artist created in 2014 in a cistern at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Lacoste, France, and in 2015 at the Zeche Zollverein in Essen, Germany. All these schematic and seemingly shadowy works in color direct our gaze, as it were, from the inside out. As if flooded with sunlight, indefinable traces and bumps appear in some of the images, cogs, grooves and metal ridges in others. This is precisely how the stories are presented to the readers: on the one hand, stories of precipitate deliveries, on the other hand legends of almost mythical measure. This initially sounds rather touching, and also quite scary; yet again, this is interrupted by the humor, which permeates most of these familial stories. The volume is currently the only deliverable monographic publication on the work of this abstract American painter who was born in New York in 1965, and now lives in Los Angeles. In 2014, she was included in the anthology Painting Today by Tony Godfrey; she has become known for her radical style, informed by human legacies, such as stains and graffiti, a kind of cartography of human traces.