MFA camp

Culminating Semester Portfolio

2010-11-10T21:56:00.005-05:00

This link takes you to Google docs where you can download my 46 MB MFAIA Portfolio of text + images which tells the story of my creative practice through a degree process:

MFA-IA Final Portfolio

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Dynamo Commutator Experiment

2010-06-01T21:37:00.000-04:00

The conventional means of presenting the arts in this country provide a limited number of opportunities for practicing artists to connect their work with their public. Refusing to wait to be chosen by a conventional venue, I am making efforts to assume responsibility for the production of my work and exploring an alternative space for my work to be accessible.
Click on the post title to get to the site!

The Dynamo Commutator experiment is a project about the world. Using a Google Site, digital images, poetry and hypertext methodology, it is a paradox of time and space. The web-based art (visual + poetry + audio) site is a condensed micro space: contained by the size of your monitor, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and dependent on access to a computer and the Internet. Images and text are embedded in the site and the poetry can be read in a typical linear progression or as non-linear, based on where + when you click on the links.

I begin with the claim that all poetry is a performance; even when a poem is fixed on a page it still performs. To move a poem to other media is simply a multidimensional close reading. The Dynamo Commutator project develops the use of media other than the standard printed page for the transmission of poetry + digital imagery. The next stage is to collaborate with others to add their art / poetry / music + hyperlink edits.

This is Not an Exit

2009-12-11T19:01:00.000-05:00

VUE Map: Concept mapping (sometimes referred to as ‘mind-mapping’) as a learning tool has been documented in 40+ years of cognitive science research. The Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) is a concept and content mapping application, developed by Tufts University to support teaching, learning and research. Simple tools and a basic visual grammar consisting of nodes and links, maps and/or organizes relationships between concepts, contexts, ideas and digital content in non-linear ways.

Rhizome is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972-1980) project. Based on the botanical rhizome, it is what Deleuze calls an "image of thought" that apprehends multiplicities. Rhizome describes theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation.

Carl Jung used the term rhizome to describe the universal unconscious, the presence in all people of a set of shared images and their significance. The Internet and its rapidly spreading communities is described as a rhizome. It is also gaining rapid momentum in pedagogy, particularly when utilizing Internet and computer-based technologies.

Rhizomes oppose the idea that knowledge must grow in a tree structure (arborescent) from previously accepted ideas. New thinking need not follow established patterns, new conceptual territories result from unpredictable juxtapositions. The root of the rhizomic plant needs to be close to the surface to flower, as does rhizomatic thinking need to be present in daily life to affect thought. It is an open system, most effective as a tool when personally incorporated, accessing the concept of rhizome through experience.

With this motivation, I cast the rhizome as a site of defiance to the arborescence of packet documentation, progress “report” narrative and—thinking forward—to the structure of the Final Portfolio. I believe my process, practice and acquiring knowledge has always dodged linear interpretation. My challenge was to think more originally, through thinking more organically.

How to articulate the complexities of art and art-making, subjects that are conceptually and methodologically both personal and global. Off-shoots ricochet in all directions; classification seems impossible; the task of selecting and following interactions, terms and relations are massive. How to think this?

As artists, we are faced by a need to find alternative ways to analytically respond. Artists recognize the skills necessary in the process: acute observational skills, intermingling experience with theory and practice, 'fieldwork' of an experience, and coming to new realizations, often in manner difficult to detect. To capture the ways in which I understand and see certain associations unfolding in my field of study, I responded to the concept of rhizome as a new way of 'thinking' these connections.

By the end of the semester, I began creating a Visual Understanding Environment (VUE) map as an act of bridging gaps between the conceptual, methodological and experiential. I downloaded the free and open-source software and learned the capabilities of the current version of the program. 'Fieldnotes' of a kind were kept by a semester-long journaling experiment, and it is through reflection on these, the map resulted.

Describing how connections and 'rhizomatic' thought appear in the everyday is a difficult task. The VUE map has a larger purpose than creating a system of interlinked concepts. It has to show what that system does; so I will be continuing forward with this project into G4, along with developing a pedagogy with a rhizomatic perspective.

The Moon + Digital Collage

2009-12-01T18:30:00.001-05:00

"Heaven, a Detail or Hell, a Detail"

This is 22" in diameter. Was a concrete encrusted lid when I found it on a jobsite. It's meant to be exhibited on a floor..

Black is a property; a black shape can hold its space and place in relation to other things, and holds itself in a compressed field. It is the densest color material, absorbing and dissipating light to a maximum, changing the artificial and natural light in a room. There are no metaphorical or other misreadings when you cover a surface with black. A substrate covered with black is an extension of drawing, which is an extension of markmaking. Using color, extends coloration as its unavoidable allusions.

Collage is about shifting relationships, willfully dismantling assumptions and rearranging them to suggest what is conceivable. Collage makes use of contradictions. It is the medium of surprise and hopefully startles us out of ambivalence.

I am blatantly using my poetry in these pieces. What you are seeing here is a digital sketch for the painting. I am planning to apply black stick-on vinyl letters for the text. Or maybe white vinyl letters (?) The decision will be made in the doing- I am intentionally disengaging hand writing with chalk on the chalkboard surface- it’s too obvious and less ironic. That said, if the vinyl letters don’t work for this piece, I could chalk over them, remove them, and leave the negative space of their past presence…

Audre Lorde wrote: "It is not those differences between us that are separating us. It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation." Sister Outsider (pg 115)

Talking with my students over the past 5 semesters, it is obvious that we are of a time that, particularly for young men and women, is not very cordial to idealism. The early 21st century is characterized by a cynical worldview; the danger is not to have the hope to affect change. Anger is as disjointed as our communications; there is too much to be angry about. There are so many issues, all at once, that sometimes we feel powerless.Most of these young women and men—in group discussion—reject ideological generalizations of the sexes. Young women do not call themselves feminists, they consider it part of who they are. They say they stand up for up for themselves. But the question is, will they stand up for other women?

Re-vision

2009-11-06T19:59:00.004-05:00

A Memory I Recognize, As Though We Had Been Children Together

Titled from a line in the poem The Pond by Louise Gluck

“When painters feel the need to make a shift toward self-discovery, they turn to black and white for a time.” An unverifiable quote from Barnett Newman.

It is impossible to justify everything by the logical. Andre Breton wrote about the sublime point (le point sublime) with which some part of the human mind communicates directly. The key to our mental prisons, a device for liberating thought, is the free play of analogies. In the case of automatic writing, it is the word that is "found" and a voice is given to objective chance. The find, whether object or word, represents communication between the mind and the world.

The changes for this painting actually came to me in when I was involved in some routine blah, blah, blah…but I knew I wasn’t satisfied with this piece for months (it was part of G2packet 4). It had been sitting on a shelf in my living room—where I don’t live much these days—passing it by on way in and out of the house. All of the painting antagonized me: ground color, the metallic red wire, the rusted concept…I took the spray paint to it- all matte finishes, no shine, I needed it to be more absorbent of light, physically. I wanted it to be more powerfully graphic.

My first intent was to spray it completely white. I stopped here to live with it and see what happens. There’s a process of listening to the paintings. I know when to stop if I can acknowledge its identity, its “wholeness”, its ability of converging meaning in ways I find interesting.

G3 Packet 3+4

2009-11-06T19:37:00.001-05:00

Exquisite Encounters Book Project

Artwork for Mary Ruth’s book. Her theme has to do with clothing and its relationship with identity. My concept is based on split paged books, like the ones that allow you to put different animal body parts together to make strange creatures.So, I collected (12) HD paint samples that have names like “Intellectual” “Indiscreet” “Echo” “Ashes”.

It took awhile to come up with the body I wanted to use. My first efforts were cut from magazines, but I didn’t like the effect. I decided I wanted something to remain the same on each page, even as the colors changed. The idea was that the identity may change, but the person remains the same. So, I found the 2400 BCE goddess figurine- talk about withstanding the test of time! I am using my favorite new drawing implement- the wood burning tool. It burns away the paint, so it’s like making scratchboard drawings. The image embeds in the paper, unlike ink which sits on top. So the colors, the labels and the surrounding environment change, and you can switch tops and bottoms, but the woman remains the same. The colors + names have been chosen specifically for their top or bottom positions. I had considered the effect of having intellectual on the bottom ½, but I opted out of the smart-ass references…

Ellipses...

2009-09-28T17:16:00.009-04:00

G3 Packet 2

(note: click on images for larger view)

Reluctantly, They Began to Dream of What They Wanted

This painting is a 25" x 36" diptych. In the last packet, the top ½ was shown with quotes from Peter Doig and Louise Gluck reinforcing the unsaid and the deliberate silence. Silence and the power of the unfinished has been persistent in my work as a concept: violence as a silencer, passive silence, ignorance, shame, death, loss, desire. In this piece, I was also working with the idea of potential and scale.

If you’ve never seen the 1977 film produced by Charles & Ray Eames, The Power of Ten, it’s finally available to anyone without purchase. I came across this film 2 years ago as a resource for my History of Graphic Design students. At the time, the Eames company (run by their children) was holding tight to its availability and only one site managed to escape the copyright distributions. Tirelessly removing it from the public realm was ironic; Charles & Ray Eames’ mission was education and accessibility through the power of design. Fortunately, the Eames site now promotes the film as an educational resource, there are traveling exhibits and nobody is pursuing youtube posts.

This painting has multiple perspectives and scales: physical layering of plywood/luan and assemblage, drawn and physical horizon lines, color fields/lines that refer to aerial views of a topography, mountain scapes, references to the elements of water, earth, air and fire, spiritual and concrete. The larger field of pale green can be experienced as springtime renewal or the stagnant slime of pond algae. There are many ways in and out here, but the larger scale of the quieter field against the shifting activity above it is meant to sustain the present…there, is here.

Exquisite Encounters Book Projects

From Linka Behn: “My offering to the group creation originated as a date book: 2007-2008 calendar (school year) on a spiral binding, 6” x 9” on a horizontal layout, my entries still within the weekly pages. The book was a photography datebook, the opposing pages hold reproductions of old travel photo’s from around the world… My request to each artist was to use phrases from Old English poetry as ‘seeds’ from which to provide a visual/written response. Phrases chosen were particularly visually rich, or emotive, encouraging interpretation. These phrases were cut from a garage sale book of poetry, then put inside a small envelope mounted on the opening page. Each is to select one (or more) from the envelope, using the words as a beginning point for the entry. At completion, I asked that the phrase be attached in some way, to show the origination of the visual/ written thought.”

Eight Years and Five Rolling Moons

Here Tulips Bloom As They Are Told

These are my contributions to Linka’s book project. The phrases were used as intended. The “seed” phrases Linka chose are emotive and visually rich, but also have a sentimentalized language- we don't speak like this any longer:

What happens next is typical for me. I flipped them all over, looking for inadvertent opportunity:

I manipulated the phrases in Photoshop for the resulting poem:

From Tammy Parks: “I bought a used book for fifty cents at the Goddard library because I liked the feel and heft of it in my hands. It is entitled The Architecture of the Old South…The opening page of my book asks the question, how does art shape a place? I added a few images of places shaped or created by artists for inspiration. I added no other suggestions or restrictions for their responses. I am interested in knowing what words or images result from the simple question…The book is a space being transformed into a place by their thoughts, images, words and contributions.”
House of The Early Mary

Shelter Thee

These are my contributions to Tammy’s book project. I played with the idea of making work to fit the environment and making the environment fit for the work. From the outset, I didn’t intend to make art to fit the book, but wanted to make what I truly feel, put it in the book and say, “Here is something of myself,” and let it tell in this environment. Paying forward the collaboration, I installed the poem from Linka’s flipside seeds into Tammy’s book.

...my Practicum project has stalled because of my bronchitis…

Images from an experimental accordion fold book project: So far, it's been just that- experimental. I don’t know where it’s going, and I’ve also lost my way in the present of it. The structure is overwhelming me with its demand of stacked pages because I’ve been trying to work from the end back to the beginning. I’ve let go of this project being anything more than exploratory.

Sand Found at the Bottom of a Bag from Last Summer

2009-09-04T18:56:00.017-04:00

G3 Packet 1

In the PriceChopper, I collided with a display of mussels on chipped ice. Clumped together on wave-washed rocks, they had moved slowly, attaching and detaching their byssal threads to attain a better life position. Now stacked and bound in red net bags, I am struck by the glossy blue-black shells, their beard remnants snapped shut on damp prismatic chambers. I look at them until I’m excused out of the way by someone wanting the tilapia. Heat will cook the mollusks open, revealing moist and edible considerations. Open shells caught in a shriek—before they hit the pan—must be discarded.

I scribbled the word “mussels” on my grocery list and tucked it back into my purse. Driving home from the store, I was thinking about seeing the mussels, and my art work; that art at its best is found, starting with the inside of a painting rather than it’s surface, the content of the poem rather than its figures of speech. Looking at my studio or my paintings, this doesn’t appear to make sense; I collect and am inspired by things with surface qualities. My poems are formed with similes, metaphors, textures of imagery. I admire and take pleasure in craftsmanship, rhythm and composition. But—for me—the craft can’t be an end in itself. I would not work so hard if it were only about the well-made object. The art is within the painting, the poem (whatever discipline) at the center, deeper down; it’s what the craft works on. When the “language” combines with the meaning to make us experience what we understand, we find the art.

“Finding” a poem or a painting is finding resonance; subterranean sources that power the subjects and ideas put into the artwork. My sources will be different from someone else’s: maybe it’s family, politics, gender, love and sexuality, fears and secrets. Whatever I am made of, I’ll need to dig it up and feed it to my work.

Of The Ocean

This is an experiment combining my poetry with painting. Most of the poem’s text is literally embedded in the painting- no pun intended (well, maybe); it’s stamped into the painted wood surfaces. Full text of the poem was displayed as the title in my current exhibit. I might need to let go of this literal-ness in the future for this experiment to succeed. Why? I’m not sure beyond a gut level response and convincing psychological self-analysis that I’m holding onto making the poem so obvious because I want my poetry read, instead of what the painting could become. I don’t want my paintings to “illustrate” the poem. If the text is now part of the painting, I am opposed to closing down other sensory experiences because of our immediate response to words. This is a difficult balance for me to find; I am probably banging some experienced viewers over the head in the meanwhile.

Exquisite Encounters Book Project

I spent 2 weeks researching for this project. I found many “altered book” sites with interesting images and techniques on the internet, however I was more interested in making conceptual art rather than a technique-driven pretty/ gritty craft project. Searching “book arts” returned valuable motivation. My favorites are: Women’s Studio Workshop, Minnesota Book Arts Center MCBA prize and Book Arts Web.

After ransacking my bookshelves for a suitable sacrifice, I realized I didn’t want to take that route. I make art not only with found materials, as a musty book would be, I also utilize mundane materials in alternative ways. The most intriguing books in my childhood (still are) were pop-ups. One of my favorite books, read to my daughter, was The Jolly Postman. This book has actual envelopes addressed to fairytale characters with letters you can take out and read! Yes, it is a federal crime to open Red Riding Hood’s mail but this book is oh so tactile and gratifyingly nosey! Memories of this book are with me and I dug it up for my project.

Paper bags are simple and utilitarian, often overlooked until you need to cover a textbook or make a hand puppet. By the way, the manufacturing process was invented by a woman. In the “greening” process, cooler bags and cloth shopping bags are overtaking paper. I still use them on occasion and found the lunch sized sacks scattered about my pantry. I wanted to have open pages in my book and hidden compartments.

The theme concept evolved from the everydayness of the brown paper bag and the seen/unseen of their structure: How power structures everyday life, how art participates in our abilities to make things change and move. We can and do shift power all the time. We are also shifted around ourselves by power in many forms. My book encounter is about investigating where power is located in your everyday life and how an art form can analyze this.

I typed the theme and the origin of the word “matrix” on recycled library catalog cards. Aside from its ubiquitous tie to the movie, we use matrix (like many words) in a variety of disciplines, often without knowledge of its origins. After my discovery, it then became a forceful underpinning for the concept.

The inside front cover was based on the Rorschach inkblot test. We are all familiar with the fun of inkblots; it’s the questions of subjectivity and assessment that are disturbing. Mine somehow and serendipitously can be seen as a musclebound figure with an aggressive display stance- breasts floating away… How about that for analysis?!

Inside the cover bag is the matrix card, a poem by Adrienne Rich and a fortune teller game we play as children. The poem should be obvious. The fortune teller is a game but also about luck, fate and power. As girls, many were designed to predict our romantic futures. The color black was chosen for it’s western symbolic references: solemn, grief, evil. Also elegance, authority, stability, wealth, reverence, respect and slimming. In many eastern cultures black symbolizes wisdom, harmony, and reflection. I plan to refine this element later, having come to better production ideas after my book was sent.

The 1st book I received was from Jennifer, her theme: How do we define use? Jen taped her pages closed in true Dada spirit of the project! My entries (seen in the Picasa album) are about emotional and concrete (ab)use. The response is meant to be experienced in the pages, no need to overstate with post-production details.

PRACTICUM

So far, I’m encouraged by the experience. The Muir House bar cards were done without my presence. And of course, somebody drew a FUCK YOU finger…I thought it would take longer to show up!

I was present for the 3 cards from the restaurant’s music night and was able to facilitate. I only provided black sharpies, scissors and a glue stick, retrieved from my purse like Mary Poppins. Sheila dug through her handbag for materials and used lipstick for color. The other 2 cards were made by people sitting at a nearby table. Their interest evident, I invited them to make a card. They joined the project enthusiastically but shyly. As it turned out, a man I spoke to briefly that evening (but do not remember) expressed his interest in me to Sheila the following week. Art generates romance?

I brought cards (alone) to the bar where my paintings are exhibited, but nobody was interested. It appears to be more inviting when there is more than one person- a group effect.

The collage series were made at a family gathering to celebrate Jessi’s (my daughter) 21st birthday. With insights of family, there are personalized perceptions running through this pack of results! There were six adults and one 7 yr old. I don’t want to analyze the individual cards, too much backstory. There was surprise that I brought art materials and a project. And hesitation. Informed that this is a degree project, created emphasis for participation-it would be cold to say no at this point. Did I facilitate or manipulate? I’m okay with the ethics here.

Most every initial response includes insecurity about creativity and what to make. Here, I offered to suggest topics if they got stuck, but once the magazines/collage materials were out on the table, everyone found a start. Looking through old National Geographics is usually an adventure in itself. We worked at this for a good 2 hours! My sister-in-law, the most self-defining as non-creative/non-artistic, actually made very interesting cards. My brother wanted us to “read” the meaning of his card and see if we “got” his intentions. Their 7 yr old wouldn’t commit to his card- if his idea doesn’t turn out perfectly, he won’t do it. My Mom+Dad made cards with the same topic- not a surprise. Jessi’s first card expressed her current romantic state and the second was more playful and abstract.

I plan on moving onto the park and a farmer’s market in the next weeks. I may do some with a 4H group. I’ll be setting up a blog for these cards in the next 3 weeks so people can view their cards and the project as a whole.

Poetry

What I find frustrating about working in different disciplines is when one discipline crowds out the other(s). Writing and revising poetry has taken over my practice most evenings, and feels like an addiction to doing puzzles. These are the 2 revised with Rick at the residency. You saw them last semester, this is what they look like after his 2 lessons:

The Motive Power of Heat

Everything

in the universe

except the system

is known as

surroundings.

The system is separated

from the remainder

of the universe

by a boundary

between stove, sink

refrigerator.

It's much brighter out here

than I expected. Why do I

remember time more often

as raining with our quiet

evening voices?

Darkness is delivered

to the ground. Someone

passes by.

If love is to be done

at a finite rate free

energy is subject

to irreversible loss.

There's nothing here

I don't already know.

Our molecules

combined. Left alone

they won't separate

again. The curves

of my body press into

the muscle of his, rolled

together like a set of plans.

Opening a Very Tiny Umbrella

Things accumulate:

Brakfast bowls, coffee

mugs, dinner plates, utensils.

I can't keep wishing

all day and undoing

it every night, curled into

my hot portion of space,

In another room,

our daughter is watching

cartoons; thwaps, plunks

zoom whistles, her

giggles, hover in spring

cobwebs.

The faucet fills the sink.

The sponge is heavy with soap.

A papercut stings.

Water always runs

through my fingers drained

of feeling. If I could

scoop it up, screw down a lid,

I'd know where

the tears went.

The lessons on revision: line breaks that worked with the sounds of the words as well as content, too much didactic information and its repetitive droning, overwhelming the poem with what I already know instead of working inside it to find a surprise/alternative as the poem forms. The third poem, Impinging...didn't make it through the revision process, yet! Rick is not convinced I can make the blank spaces work in a vocal reading, but I'm seeing it acted out and on paper- visually. There is much to challenge me here, I have raw material but no second nature craft ((I love painting!!!)) I’ve got 2 poems in process; look for them next packet.

Studio Process- G3 packet 1

2009-09-04T18:54:00.000-04:00

Poetry

2009-06-20T21:46:00.006-04:00

Impinging Against an Array of Very Thin Tines

If I could just touch her wrist, without

her grabbing my hand. Mama bends backwards,

tweaking the lawn chair, gripping

the arms. She says the stars are twitchy

sequins on a black velvet ballgown.

Mama wishes on a sequin:

“ ........................................”

I don’t ask.

Mama has a name

she won’t use.

The fat man that used to live here,

he really gave it to her.

Made her cook Steak-umms and watch his T.V.

One night, when he flips

through the channels, Mama whispers,

“.......................................... ”

He took the dog, left

with his names still on her.

Mama’s new man

has a red beard,

wears a black hat,

won’t change his underwear. He says: “Shut up,

I don’t get dirty from sitting in a chair all day.”

Mama can’t sleep. She says

stars crumble down at night, leaves

all those twitchy sequins on her.

Mama gives me her old jewelry box

lined in black velvet and lint. It winds up

in the back, the coil releasing

hesitant pings.

Producing and Opening a Very Tiny Umbrella

Things accumulate:

Breakfast bowls, coffee

mugs, dinner plates, utensils.

I can’t keep wishing

all day and undoing

it every night, curled into

my tight hot portion of space.

In another room, our daughter is

watching cartoons; thwaps,

plunks, zoom whistles,

her giggles, hover

in spring cobwebs.

The faucet fills the sink.

The sponge is heavy with soap.

A papercut stings.

Water will always run

through my fingers, until drained

of feeling. If I could

scoop it up, screw down a lid,

I’d know

where the tears went.

The dishes are done

and now you show up

in the kitchen, wavin’ your

deedle-dee at me! My face

is intent on nothing,

not a wish, not a dare,

I just see It dangling—

Someone else has been with me

in a room with a desk,

in a room with a bed, someone

who touched my face

and everything that was not there

was at least felt

with just enough air

to make a sigh.

And now your brutal

knowledge of me collects

in the sounds of your mouth

so fast, your words are spaces

the pain slices through—

and through,

I hear the whistling anvil.

Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat

Everything in the universe, except

the system, is known as

surroundings. Noticed from the street,

is my kitchen window and I’m preparing

a dinner,

for two, maybe

three or four—

The system is separated from

the remainder of the universe

by a boundary. Wedged in

a small triangle

of space, between

stove, sink, refrigerator,

I’m balancing on the most exquisite

clay feet.

For closed systems, boundaries are real.

For open systems, boundaries are often

imaginary. I am waiting

on the porch; it’s much brighter

out here than I expected. Why do I

remember the arrow of time

more often as raining, when it was summer

twilight? With our quiet evening voices

and fireflies, whirling

like particles of lust

in the slanting light.

The possible exchanges of work, heat,

or matter take place across

a boundary. Darkness is delivered

to the ground: it could not be stopped.

Headlights pass my driveway, turn

down the street; someone passing by,

on their way to contentment

or disappointment.

The potential energy of a hairspring

works in any state of oscillation.

Tap/up/tap/down, I’m standing here

long after the view has changed,

attached to a linear spring.

If love is to be done

at a finite rate, free energy is subject

to an irreversible loss. There’s nothing

here that I don’t already

know, like vivid snapshots

waiting to be taken.

As time passes in an isolated

system, internal differences

tend to even out.

One weird little horn blare

happens for half a second—

ice melts, diluting

the water in my glass—

sliding on a rough surface, slowing

down rather than speeding up—

all measures of how far along

this evening-out process has progressed.

A certain amount of light is required

for the demon to "know"

the whereabouts of all the

particles in the system. In the noise

of crickets and a wobbly ceiling fan,

our molecules combined. Left alone,

they won’t separate out again.

The curves of my body press

into the muscle of his, rolled together

like a set of plans.

Quantum, in Latin, means how great?

Or how much? There’s the curve of his back,

bent over to lace up his boots. I think

over time, ignoring the effects

of self-gravity, differences in

temperature, pressure, and density

I’d be forgiven.

* title based on an 1824 book Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire and on Machines Fitted to Develop that Power, by French physicist Sadi Carnot, a preliminary outline of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

The End of G2

2009-06-20T21:31:00.003-04:00

Self evaluation is the final words of G2. Goddard asks the questions, I respond:

What creative work have you done this semester and how have you documented it? Have you learned new skills, media, concepts, etc., in the process? Has any of this been experimental? If so, what were you attempting, and what have you learned through this work?

Paintings, prints, assemblages/wall hanging.

Text based work

2 blogs: my painting blog documents my work as an Internet show/tell, my MFA-IA blog documents my packet essays and progression of research.

I used Picasa to document my “vagina” component project with images meant to coincide with an essay about patterns, process and time. This interdisciplinary approach of “speaking nearby” between image and word, is a method I’d like to continue pursuing, leading me to consider it in the form of an installation and/or stop-action animations.

Systems were an overt and underlying theme in my work this semester: the grid, repetition, units, layers, time; concepts of closed systems where nothing can get in or out and open systems where there is permeability. Patterns: of society, politics, aesthetics, science, disciplines, people. “How do you anticipate a future you haven’t experienced?” was a question that arose from trying to understand the multiple systems converging into the current economic crisis and the people affected; with the abstraction of statistics, we don’t comprehend the meaning of the data, the context, the realities of the actual people represented by numbers, formulas, and equations. This study segued into my “vagina” project— gender based crimes of war and domestic violence.

Continued study of Japanese poetry and art is evident in my use of scale, proportion and perspective in my paintings: compressed or isolated into a singular event, the shifts of perspective are from looking at, down, and through.

I studied Printmaking methods that don’t require a mechanical printing press to experiment with the repeated image. I explored Monotypes, but most often I utilized a stamping process, finding or making my stamping “tool” and trying a variety of substrates and paints.

What intellectual research and study have you engaged in this semester (i.e., what authors have you read, artists studied, music listened to, dance or theatre attended, etc.)? What other areas of inquiry have you pursued? What would you say are the learning outcomes of this research? Please attach an annotated bibliography.

The retina is made from brain cells, the brain begins at the back of the eye— seeing turns into thinking right there. But visuality is more than cognitive function, or “natural”. Our structure of visuality and representation is defined by systems of power and/or economics; a convincing argument for the Renaissance nudes—appropriation of mostly female bodies—has a lot to do with the new relationship between artists and patrons in that time.

Visuality is also never as simple as a dichotomy between women and men; gay men and lesbian women have yet another set of perspectives to bring into the discussion. This should be important for a feminist reading of art history as well.

Feminism is still an active field and there is much work to be done on all levels- public as well as intimate. I think women have changed the discourse of art and art history tremendously in the past thirty years; part of the reason has to do with postmodernist rejections of the “canon”, and consequently, to the change of what constitutes valid art and art practices. In contemporary art, there is a huge emphasis on the body; beyond the traditional nude or its classical mythology, the body is up front and center, realized from various perspectives. Artists dismantle representation through the body, and it is through the body that the agenda of body politics comes up.

It’s difficult to know where interests end and influences begin, books, journalism, science, TV, music, poetry, people…the artists’ craft of painting influenced my writing and the writers’ craft influenced my painting. I carried forward my interest in quantum physics and engaged the Laws of Thermodynamics conceptually for my visual work and poetry.

Artists:

Richard Tuttle

Judy Pfaff

Ann Hamilton

El Anatsui

Eva Hesse

Georgia O’Keefe

Lee Krasner

African + Pacific Island fetishes/shrines

What products have emerged from this semester? Will any of those contribute toward your Portfolio and degree criteria requirements?

17 visual art works;

5 poems—3 at critique stage, 2 gestating;

Essays on practice/process.

V-Project: I am making an effort to reclaim the lost territory of connection and continuity in the chronology of historical discourse. The components I created are unsentimental symbols of vaginas—not meant to be essentialist or reductive, but imaging a part of the body hidden, yet not sealed off from the external world; they are passageways—not fixed points—connecting the inside with the outside, binding one being to another in complicated ways. They are portraits, memoir, autobiography, documentary, fictions.

The concepts motivating this project, experiments with systems, visual and text based work have been at work in defining my Portfolio and the degree criteria.

How has your work this semester affected your art practice and how you see yourself as an artist?

I asked three questions at the start of the semester: What ‘work’ does the ‘artwork’ do? What work do I want the artwork to do? What work does it do for art practice?

Things give themselves to be seen. It’s not the seer that initiates the visuality but the seen. The artist acts as a relay for other acts of reception, expanding the visual world to make visible what was invisible, making opportunity for others to see something they could not or did not see for themselves and expand the capacity to care, if they wish to.

I try to remain conscious of my posture and actions in the world surrounding me- moves and countermoves. Making art is an intimate and physical act, involving gesture and markmaking; the painting is a document of my private performance. The countermovement is a conceptual or metaphysical response to the world I am part of.

How much does identity intervene in the visual response? I am a woman, and also an artist, American, 47 years old, mother-of a daughter… Does this have any meaning for my intervention into the visual field, and if so, then what? While postmodernism allows me to work with a variety of perspectives, I believe we are not contained within the frame of absolutes, as in objectivity or subjectivity.

How do you see yourself progressing towards degree criteria, including developing a sense of context for your work, an understanding of the nature of art, and ability to engage in discourse?

Whether we like it or not, the chronology of western art history and traditions of painting exist; there is an impossibility with those traditions of making and exhibiting paintings even as it’s impossible for me not to paint. Most of the conventions and barriers between art forms have been blurred, dismantled and repopulated. In order for painting to survive, it had to find alliances with the other forms and I am currently working in the arena of that reinvention.

We live in an unsettled, moving and shifting world- a painting punches a hole in that momentum, slows time down and stretches the present moment. The paradox of the fixed object is that in order for it to survive, its meaning must change. ‘Good’ art is not formal objects; they have to be indeterminate enough to sustain reinterpretation over the years—they have to continue to ‘happen’.

Ultimately, with all the intention evident in my work, engagement with historical discourse, theory and critical analysis, what I meant to say is irrelevant. I have made a lot of paintings and written poetry and prose and in the end, they don’t have the meaning of what I had meant to say. What matters is, the consensus of experience of the audience: what the work means in a particular moment. This does not discount the artist, it frees the artist to be concerned with the process of thinking and the process of meaning.

Overall, what were your goals for this semester and how well do you think you met them? What do you see as your strengths of this semester? What areas, skills, etc., do you need to continue to work on?

My first solo exhibit was in February, installed in the gallery of a public art space. This body of work was comprised of 21 art objects, which I began in 2006. 18 of them were completed in the 9 months prior to the show, presenting work from G1 and G2.

While I was not disappointed in the coherence of my exhibit, I discovered that my concept of a body of work had not been thoroughly realized as I made the work. My current art work evolved from the preceding body; I deepened my focus on the concepts of time, space and process and limited my mediums to specific materials of metal, paint, paper and wood. As a result, all of the prints, paintings and poetry I worked on concentrated a central theme and are meant to be components in a series. I believe I achieved this goal successfully.

Another decision-making process I worked with is how to move from one painting to the next—lateral, back, forward, deeper, wider…Have I completed the research on this idea? Is there a final resolution? This was also accomplished.

I make things with my hands. And grapple with theory and critical discourse. Through research, readings and promptings of my advisor, I have become more aware and sensitive to the concerns and arguments of high culture / low culture, accessibility, appropriation, class, race, gender. While it is hugely important to me that art should be fundamentally integrated into all levels of society, so that it becomes a part of daily life instead of apart from it, I still haven’t found my method(s) for this as practice.

I’d like to practice more poetry and do more work on integrating my poetry into a physical format that is not “book arts”, not traditional printmaking, and which may include sound.

I still need to work on my self-discipline and creating enough mental space to accomplish my work.

A Fundamental Lesson in Quantum Physics (Packet5)

2009-05-27T21:32:00.006-04:00

If you want to say that something behaves a certain way or even exists, the observation is only valid in the context of the experiment in which it was performed. To see how it would behave under different conditions, we must perform a different experiment.

These are my latest experiments. They are untitled - I’m attempting to insert one of the images here, hoping it appears less washed out than on the Picasa site! I’m not sure where I stand with these…they are units, they have a progression, there is a certain mystery about them in actuality that doesn’t come through here. At least one of them is overworked and beyond repair…sometimes too many marks is too many marks!

Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat

Everything in the universe, except

the system, is known as

surroundings. Noticed from the street,

is my kitchen window and I’m preparing

a dinner,

for two, maybe

three or four— variability

is the charm of stories.

The system is separated from

the remainder of the universe by

a boundary. Wedged in

a small triangle

of space, between

stove, sink, refrigerator,

I’m balancing on the most exquisite

clay feet.

For closed systems, boundaries are real.

For open systems, boundaries are often

imaginary. I am waiting

on the porch; it’s much brighter

out here than I expected. Why do I

remember the arrow of time

more often as raining, when it was summer

twilight? With our quiet evening voices

and fireflies, whirling

like particles of lust

in the slanting light.

The possible exchanges of work, heat,

or matter take place across

a boundary. Darkness is delivered

to the ground: it could not be stopped.

Headlights pass my driveway, turn

down the street; someone passing by,

on their way to contentment

or disappointment.

The potential energy of a hairspring

works in any state of oscillation.

Tap/up/tap/down, I’m standing here

long after the view has changed,

attached to a linear spring.

If love is to be done

at a finite rate, free energy is subject

to an irreversible loss. There’s nothing

here that I don’t already

know, like vivid snapshots

waiting to be taken.

As time passes in an isolated

system, internal differences

tend to even out.

One weird little horn blare

happens for half a second—

ice melts, diluting

the water in my glass—

sliding on a rough surface, slowing

down rather than speeding up—

are measures of how far along

this evening-out process has progressed.

A certain amount of light is required

for the demon to "know"

the whereabouts of all the

particles in the system. In the noise

of crickets and a wobbly ceiling fan,

our molecules combined. Left alone,

they won’t separate out again.

The curves of my body press

into the strength of his, rolled together

like a set of plans.

Quantum, in Latin, means how great?

Or how much? There’s the curve of his back,

bent over to lace up his boots. I think

over time, ignoring the effects

of self-gravity, differences in

temperature, pressure, and density

I’d be forgiven.

*title based on an 1824 book Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire and on Machines Fitted to Develop that Power, by French physicist Sadi Carnot, a preliminary outline of the Second Law of Thermodynamics

This poem consumed most of my 3 week packet venture. It’s meant to bring the language of science into poetry. I studied some of the thermodynamic laws for this -on a VERY limited basis- in order to combine some of the mechanical properties of science with the metaphysical and emotional qualities of a love affair.

I am writing poetry but it’s an addendum; the challenge of using words is a mental exercise. It IS important to my visual artwork, as an alternate encounter with images and ideas that require only paper and pen. Poets and writers who write about their craft, inspire my visual practice. I experimented with digital images and poetry last semester, but could go no further because I was committed to a deadline for my exhibit. I have not given up on this, but I know I can’t afford the costs of the print production.

My concepts for creating a book of poetry siphon through my practice of using found materials, although traditional printing methods might be considered at some point. Yes, I can imagine reading my poetry in public (I have) in the same space with my visual work.

An Interview with Myself

Do you have an interest in the relationship between art and society?

In a theoretical way, no. In a grand scale way, there’s too much responsibility for me. I am one woman making art one day at a time. On an intimate, person to person level- YES.

Working as a carpenter, I spent 8 – 12 hours a day with one or a handful of people- who were/are very supportive and interested in what I do. We ALL made something each day and could account for our presence. Sometimes, in some of the construction work, there was an artistry, a gain in the work itself, not outside of it. In that way, my co-workers had an understanding of what I do when I make art.

Last year, I decided it was time to get out of the construction industry; at 47 the winters felt longer and harder to work in. I re-entered the workday world through big-box retail. Suddenly, I was in the middle of nowhere/everywhere. I greet, smile, pass by hundreds of people each week. In the environment of retail, we move things and concepts around, but we don’t actually ‘make’ anything. Even the money is intangible- sales numbers on a chart, consumers paying with credit cards; an idea of money you are obligated to commit to some time in the future, transferring it from one place to another without actually visiting those places or touching the money you’re exchanging. This is always weird and impossible to me, like philosophy and theory; I love texture and touching things.

I work among 100 associates. Now, I’ve gotten to know more of them. Many of them know I’m an artist and some bring me materials and objects they think I might want to use. These are people who don't usually think about artists; I am overwhelmed, grateful, and inspired every time that happens- I feel connected to them in a way- there is a recognition of craving. They see this crazy woman, with a pile in the back of her Jeep of torn up luan, blown-out tire, cardboard packing, broken lug wrenches, throwing herself into these art works and whether they like the work or not, they are happy to participate in this process. It’s terrible when I forget— I get to wondering, “why am I wasting my time with this?” and then people respond.

Do you think art has a job to do in our culture? If so, what is it?

Most days I believe there is a job or purpose for art in our culture, but I don’t think it’s an experience of reality. Zen talks about the illusion of the world. Western philosophy presents us with ideology. Richard Dawkins, ethologist, evolutionary biologist, wrote the book The Selfish Gene, based on a gene-centered view evolution with phenotypes that extend beyond the organism into the environment and including the bodies of other organisms. Dawkins first introduced the term meme. A ‘meme’ is a unit of cultural evolution that ensures its own selfish survival by passing from host to host like a virus, evolving and mutating along the way according to its host’s ability to imitate it. Memes manifest themselves as catchy songs, catchphrases, logos, fashions and trends. Archetypes might be memes and I utilize them constantly in work. That’s scary.

Art refers to an act, emotion, memory, a space. In a way it’s a form of consciousness, an awareness. I know I can’t live without making it. But, science has been studying consciousness most intensively in the past 20 years, aided by PET scans, MRIs etc. and we still don’t know what it is or how it functions. Is it just a sophisticated mechanical system of parallel and affective functions, is it a soul? both?

I love a good paradox. Here’s Bonini’s: "As a model of a complex system becomes more complete, it becomes less understandable. Alternatively, as a model grows more realistic, it also becomes just as difficult to understand as the real-world processes it represents" Named after Charles Bonini, a Stanford university business professor, the paradox was articulated by John M. Dutton and William H. Starbuck, (Computer Simulation of Human Behaviour, 1971).

This paradox may be used by researchers to explain why complete models of the human brain and thinking processes have not been created and will undoubtedly remain difficult for years to come.

This same paradox was observed earlier from a quote by Paul Valéry, "Everything simple is false. Everything which is complex is unusable." (Notre destin et les lettres, 1937)

What is the process for you? What is the finished piece?

I want to get somewhere and learn something. Often, I am amazed and excited by what I’ve put together. I have been making art for 25 years—not always consistently— some of it painting, some of it sculptural, some of it poetry, some of it wearable, and I still approach it cold, like a beginner- In the Japanese language, shiroto means amateur, with a secondary signification of emptiness. In Western language, amateur signifies passion. I am like a beginner in the sense that there is no game plan, but I have an innate practice at this point.

I have to keep coming back everyday, and keep solving problems. The work looks organic, but there’s a lot of piecing and fitting and composing going on. There is a discipline, a rigor and a stubborn insistence that most people probably won’t notice in a single work, and I don’t believe the audience should find it there.

Structurally, my current paintings and prints carry forward aspects of last year’s work. I’m still using the tin can material, but now it’s just the lids becoming a dominant component. I use it as a tool for mark-making. They have become a metaphor for the vagina which is also a pathway for creation, pleasure, pain; a guardian of the center. My substrate continues with plywood in some cases, paper and canvas which I haven’t used in years. I’m still uncomfortable with the blank expanse of paper and canvas, compared with the frottage expression of the plywood grain.

Poet, essayist and lecturer, Paul Valery wrote, "A work is never completed except by some accident such as weariness, satisfaction, the need to deliver, or death", and more famously, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned". The ‘finished’ piece always feels likes support/verification/signal/data/bridge of what I’ve been thinking about or exposed to.

What is seen represents only a part of what actually took place, so you know people can miss a lot of what is there for you.

In quantum physics there is a paradox: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. It is impossible to measure simultaneously both position and velocity of a microscopic particle with any degree of accuracy or certainty. This is not a statement about limitations, but rather about the nature of the system itself and an expression of the universe.

Physical things are relative to one another. I’m sitting in a chair at my desk, writing in a notebook on the desk, hand grasping pen, pen on paper, my arm nudging aside the books and laptop, the window framing a view of blooming rhododendron and my dog, barking at the neighborhood kids playing ball in front of their house, with its living room windows, curtains open, and someone is passing from one room to the next, while yards between us, at the same moment I’m writing this down. But in art, the relationship is invisible, a relationship to something, that even in its making and its object, doesn’t exist. No matter what you see there, it belongs to you. It’s an escape from the world of relative things to invisible things. Art can be the vehicle.

I have been looking at the work of Richard Tuttle. I watched the DVD, Richard Tuttle: Never Not An Artist. Read interviews, including the one with Molly Donovan. In the late ‘60s and ‘70s his work was revolutionary; small when everything else was big, less is more, site specific. Would you look at his work in any other circumstance other than a designated art context? Most work is easily identifiable as art even out in the parking lot, a field, on the beach.

Tuttle’s materials are excruciatingly common, with a crummy, arbitrariness. I was irritated (and still am) by his intentional displacement of the ‘craft’ of the thing: splintered edges of cut plywood seem careless, masking tape around tinfoil is loosely attached and the application of paint appears to be sloppy. On an intellectual level, I get the point that these objects could easily be lost to preciousness. I try to get beyond the aesthetics—which he wants us to do—and focus on the condition of mortality, which we all share, the active participation of viewing, engaged perception and heightened sensitivity. Tuttle emphasizes three-dimensional objects in space, but his work stands in relation to the wall, as painting does. What I share with Tuttle is a search for the essence of life and experience. He distills it, cuts to the chase, brings us the final moment from the outside in and I tend towards layering/building it up, recording the moments one on the other, compressing it in on itself.

In your current work most of your forms look organic, look strongly related to life; is there something going on around that?

I have a curiosity about science and the structure of things, even if I don’t understand it. I absorb ideas looking at books, images, hearing music; I get strength from outside sources when they support where I’ve come to and inspiration for where I might go next. There are cycles in life and art.

There’s a difference between thinking and theorizing. As artists, I think we need to be devoted to thinking and contemplation. It tends to be done up high- in the head, but I see it more as basement level- subterranean need, the empty space inside of the foundation; I keep returning to Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching:

We join spokes together in a wheel,

but it is the center hole

that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,

but it is the emptiness inside

that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,

but it is the inner space

that makes it livable.

We work with being,

but non-being is what we use.

Tao Te Ching

Written by Lao-tzu

From a translation by S. Mitchell

The proactive part is putting myself in the path of information. There is both a sense of anticipation and arrival. In the open-ended search for things to paint or paint with or affix, they make themselves known to me and then known to the viewer. The process of painting is a record of how I moved that day.

I am not wholly painter, collagist, poet, but rather an artist who pursues questions, asks questions preferring them to answers. Among Carl Jung’s archetypes there is a thinker, who struggles to reconcile the need to explain and tell with the desire to make the viewer feel.

My early life had so few family stories passed down or along to root me in a family history; only two years ago did I find out that part of my family originated in Minsk, Belarus. I think I’m trying to build stories for myself in my art work.

Without Limitations: How many marks does it take? How deep?

Like many others, much of my life functions in a variety of realms- saleswoman/cashier, domestic (I clean house for a 91 year old friend), student, teacher, artist, member of a family…the listing is familiar. However, sorting through many of the roles, there are so few where I feel accomplished enough to be satisfied with my results, or even the efforts. I realize, this is sort of neurotic; the anxiety and stress from years of trying to cover as many bases as I can. The “why would I do that?” question is mostly answered with, “for practical reasons”. The rest is for psychotherapy. But here’s the dilemma: With my varied experiences, I know enough to get by, but not enough to be masterful. This is pulled under the spotlight when I make art in specific mediums. Time and space are dimensions I battle with. There is never enough or there is too much, as in: never enough time to read, learn and make all the art I have ideas for and too much time by myself. Never enough space to stretch out and explore the art work I might be capable of, and too much space that I own to just let go of it.

I make the art that I make right now because of limited time, financial resources and workspace. I make every effort to transcend or transform these boundaries. More importantly, I need to have mastery of this. I want to understand it and get down into it as deeply as I can before I spread it out; and I trust that I will when it is time.

Look at these works on paper by Judy Pfaff, I look at them and her installations all the time. Look at the space she works in, the sizes she can manifest…She is one of my art heroes. I’d love to meet her, but I’m struck dumb.

Packet4-G2

2009-05-06T05:15:00.005-04:00

Impinging Against an Array of Very Thin Tines

If I could just

touch her wrist, without

her grabbing my hand. Mama

bends backwards,

tweaking the lawn chair, gripping

the arms. She says the stars are twitchy

sequins on a black velvet ballgown.

Mama wishes on a sequin:

“ .”

I don’t ask.

Mama has a name

she won’t use.

The fat man that used to live here,

he really gave it to her.

Made her cook Steak-umms and watch

his T.V. One night, when he flips

through the channels, Mama

whispers, “ .”

He took the dog, left

with his names still on her.

Mama’s new man

has a red beard,

wears a black hat,

won’t change his underwear. He says: “Shut up,

I don’t get dirty from sitting in a chair all day.”

Mama can’t sleep. She says

stars crumble down at night, leaves

all those twitchy sequins on her.

Mama gives me her old jewelry box

lined in black velvet and lint. It winds up

in the back, the coil releasing

hesitant pings.

Lisa Strier 2009: poetry for packet 4

Call + Response: questions played forward from previous packets, advisor comments are italicized.

From packet 1:

“It is our contention that questions treating the definition of art no longer function for artists as vehicles for debating their ambitions for and with art, and other questions need to be formed to facilitate this work. Procedural definitions of art and prototype theories of art, in their greater complexity come closer to adequate social description, but lose the potential to work as a vehicle for debating issues of the value and function of art. The definitional question [‘What is art?’] is a machine that no longer works as a vehicle for artists attempting to hone their ambitions for and with artworks, but may now operate to mark the limits artists can go within the category of art. It no longer identifies organizing principles (other questions are needed for that), but might be useful to identify and police art’s farthest edges and boundaries. If disciplines are characterized by questions, is art [practice] characterized by questions, and if so which questions? And is art practice a discipline?” (Smith, C. and Reilly, L. (2007), ‘What work does the artwork do? A question for art’ Journal of Visual Art Practice 6: 1, pp. 5–12, doi: 10.1386/jvap.6.1 5/2)

I wonder, why would we want to police art's farthest edges?

I agree the word ‘police’ is difficult to apply in this context: regulate, administer, or control(origin— in the sense “public order”: from Latin politia ‘policy, government’). I typically choose different words: qualify, quantify, critique, determine… As a professional in the arts (I am making that distinction) I believe I should be able to tell when some art is better than others. Because, I can’t just watch; there are commitments to be made and cultural consequences matter.

Through research and readings while teaching, pursuing this degree and making art with the perspective of age, I have become more aware and sensitive to the concerns and arguments of high culture / low culture, accessibility, appropriation, class, race, gender.

The opportunity to make art has expanded in some places and not others. “Elite” cultures protect their domain by escalating the level of “difficulty” required from serious art; the upshot is anybody can make art that nobody understands. If you factor in contemporary arguments that certain kinds of understanding are culturally exclusive, then anybody can make art that nobody has a right to understand. Now, I sound contentious- but with a whiff of frustration with mediocrity; it’s become more acceptable to be ‘fair’ than to make judgments of good art or bad art or what art is. I interpret “the farthest edges and boundaries”, not as a reference to innovation or interdisciplines, but as something more like the popular trends of scrapbooking and altered art as well as those opaque works of art that nobody can understand.

Handknit sweaters demonstrate the human impulse to create art as much as opera does… I’m much more interested in looking at ways that everyday people make art of their lives all the time, not just at the opera house or in the gallery. The desire to create scrapbooks and handknit sweaters should not be devalued or ignored. I believe in creativity in all of its manifestations and preach it constantly. Recently, I attended a class for volunteers at my crisis intervention center. The woman standing next to me, having discovered I’m an artist, rubbed her arm against mine, asking for my creativity to rub off on her. She doesn’t think she’s creative in any way; I advocated, but did not convince her. She preferred the mojo to the process and practice. I get that; I buy lottery tickets. I also recognized the moments and stories I tell myself about what I am NOT; it’s easier to identify these limitations rather than re-imagine myself in unknown possibilities. Making art is my way into the re-imagined, sneak past those boundaries and find myself in unexpected spaces.

For me, there is more to work for beyond my impulse to create art. I am more privileged than many and less than some. This is humbling, motivating me to utilize the advantages of education and resources when I’m making art. For whatever purpose we come to the arts, each of us expects different things in different measures. The quality of an art object/experience is relative to the quantity of what it delivers: give me the most substance, for the most people and serve the most intricate communities, for the longest time.

We struggle with the value of art: philosophically, metaphysically and economically. Have you been to the W.A.G.E site? http://www.wageforwork.com/wage.html Often, I feel as if I’m making art in a vacuum. You know the dynamics of the work=product, industrialized values. In a heartbeat, I’d give up my retail job and teaching graphic design (I would rather teach other forms of artmaking) if I could make a sustainable income from my artwork. The art world is going through it’s own version of the Great Recession. In the marketplace, one work sells for 5,10,100 times the price of another and we don’t know why, and I think we should. Dave Hickey posed the well-timed questions we should be asking: How long will I remember this and how well? How long will others remember it? Does it work better than the empty space before it was situated there? Is this work better than everything and, if so, how long will I love it? How much do I think about it? How much would I miss it? How often does it surprise me? How many words can I write about it? Is this work better than works similarly priced? How much would I sell it for? What would I trade it for? How much could I sell it for? How many people agree with me? Who are they? How complex are the constellation of objects in which it resides? How deep is the historical resonance? How much does it mean and how much does that matter?

How do you anticipate a future you haven’t experienced? That's a powerful question. You wrote that this segues into a project you're working on about gender-based violence. Could you say a little more about that?

The question came to me sideways; I was reading an article about Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s version of the Black Swan Theory as it related to the economic meltdown. From Wikipedia:

The theory was described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan. Taleb regards almost all major scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments as "black swans" — undirected and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of Black Swan events.

The term Black Swan comes from the assumption that 'All swans are white'. In that context, a black swan was a metaphor for something that could not exist. The 18th Century discovery of black swans in Australia metamorphosed the term to connote that the perceived impossibility actually came to pass. The main idea in Taleb's book is not to try to predict Black Swan events, but to build robustness to the negative ones, while being able to exploit positive ones. Taleb contends that banks and trading firms are very vulnerable to hazardous Black Swan events and are exposed to losses beyond that predicted by their defective models.

Based on the author's criteria:

The event is a surprise.

The event has a major impact.

After the fact, it is usually the case that the event is rationalized by hindsight, as if it was expected to occur.

Taleb's black swan is different from the earlier (philosophical) versions of the problem as it concerns a phenomenon with specific empirical/statistical properties which he calls "the fourth quadrant". One problem, labeled the ludic fallacy by Taleb, is the belief that the unstructured randomness found in life resembles the structured randomness found in games. This stems from the assumption that the unexpected can be predicted by extrapolating from variations in statistics based on past observations, especially when these statistics are assumed to represent samples from a bell curve. These concerns are often highly relevant to financial markets, where major players use value at risk models (VAR).

Gender-based violence is a catchall phrase I dislike because it has become an abstracted placeholder that distances us from the atrocities, as well as ignoring sexual assault against boys and men. The segue occurred when I connected the abstraction of statistics to crimes against women; we don’t comprehend the meaning of the data, the context, the realities of the actual people represented by numbers, formulas, and equations. At some point this semester, I came across the photography of Chris Jordan: http://www.chrisjordan.com/ and his TED video: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats.html which also oozed into this current project.

I'm interested in the process by which you considered gifting your work, and then chose not to give it away.

Despite the enthusiastic response to my artwork, nothing sold. My Mother wanted to buy one—I don’t even know which one—but I would not allow the transaction. She prefaced the offer with “wanting to start the ball rolling” - a monkey see-monkey do sales tactic. Every piece I put in the show was coming back to me and this felt pathetic and claustrophobic. I wanted the art to go out into the world and have its own purpose. I was ready to make new work without the constant persistence of these objects in every available space of my home. Had the gallery director been there with me that day, I probably would have given him the one he wanted. I thought of leaving it, but that felt like a lonely deal. I drove the 20 miles home in silence, feeling silenced. Giving them away, would extend the art into the world. And allow me to keep hiding from the business of art: the marketing, advertising, dealing, pricing that I am so ignorant of. I kept them all, for now, because I believe they have value and can’t give up on my imagined life as an income producing artist. Some of them, I am in love with and can’t seem to let them go.

I'm curious whether women might see this work differently than men; and whether women survivors of sexual assault might relate to it differently than other women.

Having a vagina and all its accessoried implications leads me believe that men would experience this work differently. Conversely, I would see penis-works through my vagina goggles! Empathy, compassion and shared experience of pain and suffering are available to all of us through different means. However, if I do this work as well as I hope to, I believe women survivors of sexual assault could connect their personal experiences to it. Not everyone is ready or willing to open those places up.

Do you listen to music as you work?

Music is not always part of my studio rituals- like putting on my painting clothes is. Sometimes yes, and sometimes no, there is no observable condition for it. There are many times I just need quiet space. And there are times, when music or talk shows are on and I’m so in the zone, I don’t even recognize the sense of it. I was listening to Philip Glass and his contemporaries last packet. Thanks for sharing your music- I checked it out and enjoyed it. This series of paintings, I was listening to Larry Coryell, Paco De Lucia, and Eckart Tolle on Oprah’s Soul Series.

Lauren Berlant's concept of "intimate public" is very interesting. Are you convinced by her book to take mass-mediated women's culture seriously? What does that mean, and what are the gains of taking women's culture seriously? How do you think this book might relate to or influence your own perspective on feminism?

Before I read her book and visited her blog: http://supervalentthought.com/, I was convinced by my own experiences with relating to women. The course I teach on the history of Graphic Design pinpoints the label of the “public sphere” around WW I, and the corresponding ability to manipulate the public through mass media for political, social, and capital gains. Oprah is a force that is undeniable. Soap Operas. Women’s magazines. Movies. If you get a chance, watch Now Voyager (1942) on YouTube. Reality TV. Chick Lit.

But, have you noticed the role of women in sitcoms and commercials? Just as disturbing is the portrayal of men in them. I hear many women in the course of a day seeking solace in their mutual complaints without considering a redirect of their power to make it different. It’s called bitching, for a reason. Considering the number of women in the world’s population and the limited influence of change we effect, I take mass mediation very seriously. My feminism is based on awareness and social justice for everyone, including women. My activism is through my volunteer work and my art work.

Packet 3 G2

2009-04-15T20:29:00.019-04:00

Patterns.

5:00am: The alarm goes off in an annoying series of beeps. I hit the snooze button to lie in bed for 8 extra minutes in the dark, listening to the dog’s steady breathing, unable to see the piles of folded laundry, opened books and wilting ivy on the windowsill, my muscles filling up with the twitch of all the things that have to be done/won’t get done today. The important thing is to get my Grad work organized. Patterns. It’s a good idea for the notes and the artwork. And the way I see it, it’s about the fragments that structure my life. A cup of coffee, feed the dogs, and some thinking about it. This is my favorite part of the day. It’s just getting light and I’m having ideas.

6:00am: I’ve made my lunch to take to work, eaten breakfast, maneuver around my (cranky in the a.m.) daughter, take the coffee to my bathroom. A prescription for being mindful is to focus on mundane tasks, like washing your hands. I try to practice this focus in the shower, but I lose the moment when the image of a a fallen tree— giant rootball exposed on the bottom—becomes the perfect ‘nest’ for the components I’ve made for my ‘vagina’ Project. I can’t remember if I used hair conditioner

7:15am: Some things got done- dressed, remembered to take my lunch, mailed back my Netflix, beat the schoolbusses. Some things didn’t- forgot my coffee-to-go, the Art in America I wanted to read at lunch, my bank deposit. Remembered to set my intentions to the universe that I will get to where I’m going safely, my Jeep intact, and have a good (happy), productive day. I also sent this intention on behalf of my daughter because she forgets where she can go in this life.

8:00am: Things that make you go Hmmm...

During my commute to retail-work, I listen to filmmaker Scott Hicks interviewed about his PBS documentary on Phillip Glass, with excerpts from the film. 2 things stood out:

Glass describes his (enthusiastically disciplined) process as not writing music, but listening for the music that's already there—like an underground river below the dirt and geology—and pulling from that resource to USE in composing his music. Listening. Seeing.

In my 20s, I hated feeling as if I didn't possess anything meaningful (substantial) to say and at 47 I am constantly digging through all of the accumulated substance to find the purity of expression. Hmmm…

The 2nd was a story told by Glass about graduating from Julliard (an accomplishment) and then studying in France with teacher/composer Nadia Boulanger, who began by pushing him and showing him how to forget everything he already knew and learned, to begin-again- and learn to be a composer.

Hmmm...When I label myself, see myself, hawk myself as productive, contributing, self-sufficient, surviving woman, it is SO difficult to dismantle that scaffold and bust open that cocoon- isn't it just? Those attributes get me out of bed each day and take on what's needed to make a life. There's pride and a sense of able-ness. I've spent all of these years with Me- Look what I can do! It's gotten me this far! Sitting in the parking lot, waiting to punch in on time, so I never, again, have to sit with the 27 year old assistant manager, asking me what he can do (do I need different hours?) so I can make it to work on time and Me, not being able to explain that it's not about the schedule, it's about me needing the paycheck and Me, not wanting any other job, but getting up each day to make a life of art and art of life.

I leave my Jeep, clock in, available to art as life/life as art in Glass’ storytelling; a reminder- that I do not know everything (or perhaps anything) I need to know about making art, and that what I know already may be set aside.

9:00am – 12:00pm: Trying to maintain some connection to the patterns of my current project but Sales Associate work is distracting. I am not alone but I sense the loneliness and empty spaces in the conversations at work. An old man stands very near to me, tells me I smell good. He shares the details of his small repairs, killing time with nowhere else he has to be. A woman searches for air filters; her husband used to take care of these things but he died 3 months ago and she doesn’t know where he bought those stupid things. She tells me it’s hard, suddenly not knowing anything about her own house.

12:00pm – 1pm: I pack the same thing for lunch most every day. Yogurt, fruit, something crunchy. I snack on the same nuts and dried fruit every day. I try to read a book I had stashed in the Jeep, but I nap ½ hour instead. A wave of anxiety. And a thought of my packet deadline makes it worse. Deadline. A grim term for sending out art and writing into the world. It should leap from one mind to another, making the ideas live, not buried in emails and paper.

1:00pm – 5:00pm: A young cashier says her tarot readings advise ending her long engagement, she knows the cards are right, but she can’t leave him because he needs her; she thinks he’d get suicidal. A woman customer replays the complaints about her husband not getting anything done around the house. A cashier asks me “Don’t you sometimes just start a fight with your partner because you feel like it?” (No.) I am living in the middle of the “intimate public” created in this culture for women to buy into an ideal and romanticized commonality, that all women are disappointed by love and we are all the same, in it together, no matter our differences. This mass-mediated culture obscures our political agency; women are helpless to do anything more than affirm our ability to feel. In between, there is workplace camaraderie, the caring gesture of a friend who brings me coffee, consumerism and sometimes I score some trash for my artwork.

6:00pm: I’m home and starving. Yogurt is never enough. My daughter won’t be home, the dogs are fed. I prepare a salad and reheat the last (finally!) leftover of homemade beefaroni, eat in front of the computer, trying to stuff in more research. I started smoking again. I forgot to call my mother back. So what does all this have to do with art? Everything and nothing. The stuff of our lives is where art comes from. This makes women’s art different from men’s art. Because life is this stuff, patterned with so many different threads and often with little sense of what the final product will look like. We are working from subconscious patterns. How much of art is scratched by our obsessions, our intricate details, or the marks themselves? Knit from the strands. It’s not wise to specifically define the differences between men’s art and women’s art. But it should be obvious that it does not quash the expansion of human experience to see it this way.

7:00pm has gone by already!

8:00pm: Typically, I’m running out of space and the day begins to unravel. I upload the blurry portrait images of my family, including 3 generations of wedding pictures. A 50 year schedule from a 1931 Jewish funeral handout, noting which days to light the memorial candles. An image of the rules for Jewish mourners. And a fleamarket find of nurses posing on their graduation day (ca. 1950s). They look so white, in complexion and starched uniform, proud, and ready. My brother graduated from nursing school 2 years ago. He recently resigned from his 3rd facility, still searching for his place in that world. Oh the stories and patterns. My patterns. My relationships. My learned behaviors. Upload image of my heart shaped river stone collection and 2 nests. I remember to call my mother- a reiteration of: my busy schedule, her health, our love.

9:00pm: I’m wearing down. Phone call from a friend who has more and less of the troubles I do. I am an artist and a therapist! Upload images of eggrates and cardboard grids.

10:00pm: Upload images of the new ‘vagina’ Project stampings. I tried a latex based black house paint on non-absorbent poly paper- meant for dry-erase makers (yard sale purchase). I like the surface pooling appearance. I tried a vinyl floor tile, leftover from a house project, as a substrate. Same latex house paints. This has a built-in surface texture. I worked on this piece after watching the V-Day, Until the Violence Stops DVD. I scratched in marks based on my memory of the stitches displayed on a female genital circumcision model—used by a woman who travels from village to village in Kenya, rescuing girls from this horrifying tribal/cultural tradition.

11:00pm: Upload ‘vagina’ lids; experiments with grids and roots, piles and containers. I’m trying to make as many as I can. This is an obsessive act, imagining hundreds of these to make enough visual impact, to equal the real daily numbers of U.S. statistics on physical violence against women. The algorithms and equations that were used by banks and brokerage firms had no reality. This is a grossly simplistic explanation. But the lack of common sense and proportion on all sides of this financial meltdown, filtered into my project. The statistics don’t have a concrete meaning until we can see what those numbers actually look like. This sounds like I am equating human beings with tin cans. I’m not.

My concern with the scale of this piece, as it flickers it’s images in my imagination, is how often that obsessive scale has been used- Louise Bourgeois, Maya Lin, Anthony Gormley to name a few. This concern has me listening for music under the dirt and geology.

12:00am: Throw a load of sheets into the washer. Set the alarm. Eat a pear. Read last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine, and sleep.

2:00am: Wake at the sound of a freight train’s air horn signaling its arrival in Shohola. The wheels screetch on the tracks and the rumble sounds like it’s in my backyard, but it’s not. The dogs are snoring and my blanket is wound too tightly around me. I need to get loose.

2:00am – 5:00am: Dreams. Dreams give me more time.

...#...#...#...

Cogito, Ergo Sum ( I think, therefore I am) Who Does Descartes Think He Is, Anyway?

Archimedes used to demand just one firm and immovable point in order to shift the entire earth; so I too can hope for great things if I manage to find just one thing, however slight, that is certain and unshakable. (Rene Descartes, AT 7: 24; CSM 2:16)

The quote above is arrogated without context. One of the problems with articulating my context and my criticism is that I have nothing more than a broad reach across history, philosophy and aesthetics. While I have been reading, reading, reading (!), all I have to offer at this time is a Dick and Jane see Spot version. I am easily seduced by an essential-ist approach, like Lucy Lippard’s:

"I've written 18 books about art, and I still don't know about the philosophy of art, so you can forget about that," she says (http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/04-27-98/alibi_art1.html).

Nor, does she have much experience with Derrida or Lacan. Me too! I say (except for the 18 books part). And yet, Lippard has become authoritative in terms of art 'meaning' and criticism. Oh, and I think I am in love with Dave Hickey...

“ I am interested in works in which something happens when you look at them. And also I am interested in works that have either the simplicity or the complexity to change their meanings. Good art, to survive, must change its meaning…Works of art have to be free enough in the culture to sustain reinterpretation over the years, and they have to continue to happen, and that's very difficult. Works of art don't have messages. They don't have determinate meanings. They're not just formal objects. A [Jackson] Pollock doesn't mean anything, but it has meaning, we can find meanings for it, if we care to. I am really not concerned with what the artist meant. It's totally irrelevant. I have written a lot of fiction, I don't know what it meant, I know that the story doesn't mean what I thought it meant. Artists don't know what they're doing, so why ask them? What matters is, what the consensus of opinion of what the work means on a particular moment. And it really matters that a work of art can survive the changing of its meanings.  I am very concerned with the process of thinking and the process of meaning; I am not really concerned with thought or with what things mean. Works of art, according to TS Elliot, are objective correlatives; they are things in the world that we use to correlate our opinions about. That's not meant to discount the artist. It's meant to free the artist, so they can do what they want, because they don't know anyway. I know some grown up artists who know pretty well what they are doing. Ed Ruscha knows what he expects to get, so do Bridget Riley, Richard Serra, and Ellsworth Kelly. But these are people in their sixties and seventies. Anyone who is much younger than that, if they are any good, are still improvising. And then there are people, like Rauschenberg, who are 70 years old and are still improvising. Bob doesn't have the faintest idea what he's doing, but he is doing it every day. I am interested in that, I don't like rules. I think art is for people who like art, who like to talk about physical things in the world.” –excerpt from http://www.zingmagazine.com/zing14/hickey/index.html

I am writing from the center of the storm of Packet 3 and of course I'm still fumbling with the structure of these things. Where's the balance located? Obviously, NOT in how I perceive these packets. I still can't figure out who/what/where/when/why it was, or I decided, that each packet should maintain the same layout of information regardless of the current engagement with my process- and in the end I don't STRICTLY adhere to the layout anyway. Once upon a time, in a land far away and long ago, I was motivated to believe and behave accordingly: good girls are responsible, don't make trouble, are polite, practice good hygiene, and make others happy in spite of my self. Today, I'd like to say Fuck That! and actually live like I meant it (I'd still brush my teeth and wash appropriate places...).

Facio, ergo sum (I do, therefore I am): I want to make art, rather than write about art. I have been wanting to make things, rather than write about making meaning-full things while I make them. The ‘work’ seems more authentic than their ‘stories’; they are creative non-fictions.

The vertigo each week as the deadline approaches has just kicked me in the teeth- and I decided this packet that I'm kicking back (how DID the phrase " kick back" become a description of relaxation or extortion) in the sense that I am going to spend the rest of my daylight before the packet deadline practicing and living what I want to do most- visual art. The rest of the degree dogma will have to wait. I think.

Conclusive Beginnings G2 Packet2

2009-03-24T19:59:00.003-04:00

I emptied everything out. Like when you turn a purse upside down and dump it on the kitchen table. In the pile are useful things, like coin or keys. There are post-useful things to discard, like tissues and gum wrappers with chewed gum I spit out last week (?last month?—!). And things that might still be of service but I can’t be sure, like loose Advil®, crushed tampons and a ChapStick® missing its cap. Every particle of emotion, experience, intellect, essence and core whorled into the artwork I made this past year; sometimes I had to push. Hanging the show felt like achievement. The four weeks it was in the gallery (and not in my studio) was like being in two places at once. Taking the art down was a quiet leave-taking.

Inverted and shaken, I am hosed clean. I become anxious and frustrated by my self-conscious inability to connect scholarly research, critical reflection, daily life, making art and being part of a collective consciousness in community and spirit. Goals become deadlines and I feel deflated by the effort instead of imagining possibilities. Boo-hoo. There are human beings barely surviving conditions that are inconceivable to me. What should I do? Be empty.

In the ontology of Mahayana Buddhism, emptiness, shunyata, is not to be confused with nothingness. Things of the phenomenal world do not exist as separate, independent and permanent entities, but rather appear as the result of an infinite number of causes and conditions. There is only relativity. Shunyata is an absolute reality that is all things and beings, unmanifested. Emptiness has two general meanings in Taoism. As one of the qualities of the Tao, emptiness is seen as the opposite of “fullness.” The second meaning of emptiness (Wu) points to an inner realization or state of mind characterized by simplicity, quietude, patience, frugality and restraint. This mental framework brings alignment with the rhythms of the Tao, to have our mind empty of any impulses, aspirations, wishes or desires.

There is also practical wisdom for things smaller in scale than metaphysical or global suffering: In her book, Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott tells the story of her younger brother, who was in tears, sitting at the kitchen table with empty pages and unopened textbooks, immobilized by the daunting task of trying to write a report about birds (he had three months to complete it) the day before it was due. Her father sat down beside him, put his arm around him, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

Questions:

How do you anticipate a future you haven’t experienced?

Economic meltdown, sorting through the quantification of Value as Risk (VaR), irrelevant statistics, formulas and numbers without meaning, and accountability transition into investigations beyond the financial sector. This question segues into a project I’m developing about gender-based violence.

Define: Rigor!

What does David Khang mean when he says, “metaphor is not enough”?

I came across David’s advising group’s blog and he made this statement during a discussion of a student’s work. I have considered asking David for context on this comment, but decided to work on it myself first.

Ju-Pong's response(s) to my quote from the Journal of Visual Art Practice:

I wonder, why would we want to police art's farthest edges?

I’m much more interested in looking at ways that everyday people make art of their lives all the time, not just at the opera house or in the gallery.

Am I spinning my wheels on that question that Chris Reilly said is "a machine that no longer works?"

Is everything art? Are some works of art better than others? I have some very gut level responses. To discuss value judgments is not only relevant to art, but important in a culture remaining fully critical. I’ve been researching and formulating my perspective on this discourse from her response to my Packet 1 and will forward mine to packet 3.

The Wall

“I want to ask you, what is it behind your attachment to the wall? Why do you feel you need the wall?”

“Again, I wonder about the limitation (or possibilities) of the gallery space as a venue for inviting the viewer to engage in this investigation the way I can with you. So I wonder, is it interesting to you or important to provide some of this context? The bigger question is, what is the purpose or function of the gallery? How might the gallery space best serve you and your intentions?”

I am aware of the object quality of my work, being part of the space I inhabit. Like books we keep and refer to. Shrines set up in the house. My work is meant to leave my space and go inhabit an elsewhere. The transition or transformation happens somewhere else. I thought about giving the art away. An open-source.

I am not opposed to gallery walls in a traditional function as supports for the paintings’ “working space”. I am concerned by the concept of art being separated from daily life, that my work is in a distinct place to go to visit or experience the art. But distinct can be either elitist or sacred or ‘other’. I know that spirituality and collective consciousness is everywhere and accessible from any location, however attending the temple is a community connection. There is an opportunity for a deeper connection when taken out of the routine context. It should be a simple act to be present in the mundane, but we have to develop rituals to remind us, and then practice them! I want the arts (practice, process and product) to be more of community practice. I am still “one of those” artists. Other. Seeing potential resources for my work in stuff others have assigned to the dumpster seems to make me peculiar.

By nature, I am not very tolerant of serendipitous exposure. I prefer to offer up my secrets in controlled measure. Walls have their importance for me- shelter, privacy, a space of my own, retreat, structure. The gallery walls can also be a contemplative space, where we retreat from the street mechanisms, distractions and movement.

Art that responds to mass media is of the world I’m living in. Response can be many things: acceptance, disagreement, aggressive, complacent…I am not enlarging the language of painting in what I make. I am conscious that my work can be merely categorized as “junk” art. In the relationship of artist and audience, the responsibility of the observer is not entirely within my control. In spite of that, my responsibility, doggedly inherent in my process and practice, is to offer more; layers of meaning or resonance. Beyond the visual communication, the opportunity to verbally share/connect the archeology and anthropology of my work with someone who is interested, is intellectually gratifying and does fulfill a basic desire to communicate in our spoken language. What is so apparent to me, when using words to articulate the art (visual, music, dance) is the lineal progression of language. The worded experience flattens the prior multi-dimensional encounter; even as descriptive narratives shed light into my bag of tricks or suggest an investigation of symbols to expand the understanding of the art-work. Paradoxically, I determine the titles for my work vitally essential to the visual. Ironically, titling is an excruciating process for me.

I’ll use Matrimonial Tallis: Never Greet Your Husband at the Door In Your Housedress and Rollers as a concrete example. Visually, this piece immediately presents multiple, simultaneous impacts of texture, color, mark-making, shape, dimensional layering, repetition, reflection of light, illusion, recognition of materials, decay, symbol, superstition. (If I do it right)This visual offering can result in multiple, simultaneous, conscious and subconscious response. My narrative of where it came from and how it developed only floats on the surface of snarled experiences and perceptions: my mother, my father, their marriage, my ex-marriage, my daughter, my femininity and feminism, lovers, friends, society, history, religion, Judaism, attending yeshiva…even if I could visit all of it before it changes, because my experiences and perceptions are in constant motion. It is enough for me, and significant, that you laughed, felt uncomfortable and compassionate. And heard the tinny music in the background—like an old music box.

Reading my MFA blog is another way into the work for those who are interested...

I am also a practitioner of my environment and economics. All of my art-work is determined by my access to space, materials and time. This has been less of a choice—as in, I’m not ‘slumming’ it—and necessity mothering my intention. There have been times where all I had for space and material was pen and paper and I put that to use in the form of pen and ink or poetry.

To the side of environmental sustainability issues, The Art of Assemblage. Museum of Modern Art, NYC 1961, curated by William Seitz, and Dada, there are centuries of tribal cultures using what’s at hand. I am inspired by the elegant and monumental work of El Anatsui: “Art grows out of each particular situation, and I believe that artists are better off working with whatever their environment throws up.”

WORK:

I am a volunteer certified hotline counselor for the domestic violence/sexual assault (male or female) crisis intervention center in my county. One night each week I am on call to answer the hotline. Awareness of gender-based violence is actively present for me, although not on the scale of places such as Darfur, Rwanda and Kosovo.

Statistical facts have a very different face than individual people. Decisions made on the basis of rational analysis of information are not always compatible with values of compassion.

Every 2 minutes, someone in the U.S. is sexually assaulted. Here's the math. According to the U.S. Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey -- the country's largest and most reliable crime study -- there were 248,300 sexual assaults in 2007 (the most recent data available). These figures do not include victims 12 years old or younger.

There are 525,600 minutes in a non-leap year. That makes 31,536,000 seconds/year. So, 31,536,000 divided by 248,300 comes out to 1 sexual assault every 127 seconds, or about 1 every 2 minutes.

1 out of every 6 American women have been the victims of an attempted or completed rape in their lifetime (14.8% completed rape; 2.8% attempted rape).

17.7 million American women have been victims of attempted or completed rape.

9 of every 10 rape victims were female in 2003.

While about 80% of all victims are white, minorities are somewhat more likely to be attacked. Source: http://www.rainn.org

What does this data look like? I am in the beginning stages of the components and images this question prompted…The working title is simply: Vaginas. I’m still with the lids. There is a fetishness in my use of this material. This resource is such a throw-away, I feel it adds an essence of sadness.

The I.R.I.S. Project (I’m Real. I’m Strong.)

With all my attachment to art on the wall, I am attending a meeting this week at the crisis center and will propose an expressive arts workshop for a counseling group—teens and/or adults. The concept is based on Artist Trading Cards and it has a touchstone element to the artwork created.

ARTIST TRADING CARDS (ATC) are 2 ½ X 3 ½ inch works of art, the same size as playing cards or baseball cards. What makes ATC different from other trading cards is that each one is an original and, most importantly, anybody can make them.

The list of possible subjects is endless and every type of art and technique are encouraged for the ATC: painting, collage, doodling, stamping, needlework, beading, photography, digital image manipulation… The only rule is the 2 ½ x 3 ½ inches size.

The inspiration behind the ATC is they are made to trade—one for one—with other people who make cards and the trade, ideally, should take place in person. Unlike other trading cards, ATCs are never bought or sold. The point of the project is the exchange of cards as well as personal experience.

In this workshop, we’ll be making our cards using simple collage techniques. The idea germinated during conversation with a local high school art teacher I met at Art after Dark, a community event inviting residents to stroll the galleries and local shops which stay open until 9pm every 2^nd Saturday night of the month. She is working on her PHD in Expressive Arts through The European Graduate School, town of Saas Fee in the Swiss Alps. Doing some research online, I found Natalie Rogers, daughter of Carl Rogers, a founder of the humanistic approach to psychology. Visit her site here:http://www.nrogers.com/principles.html

The Question is Not “What Does It Mean”? G2 Packet 1

2009-03-06T22:28:00.007-05:00

Gary Larsen, The Far Side, 1992

The Question is Not “What Does It Mean”?

2.17.09 I delivered 21 pieces of art, comprised of 33 paintings/art objects to a gallery (public artspace) for my first solo exhibit. I officially began this body of work September 2006. 18 paintings were done in the last 9 months and I completed the wall hanging on the morning of 2.17.09. Typically for this gallery, the artist delivers the work, shares their vision for the display, and then is asked to leave; final presentation is determined by the director and his assistant. However, I was invited to stay throughout the process and participate while installing my wall hanging (it didn’t “fold” well for travel). Four hours later the show was hung and my brain was restricted to basic motor function use. And a buzzy feeling of elation.

I think it’s taken a body of work to see how I’ve been developing. In season one of the PBS series art:21, Sally Mann states that she has a magpie aesthetic; the allure of something will catch her eye and she’ll photograph it. She describes her approach as spontaneous, without overarching references during the making of it, and the need for a presence of ambiguity in the subject and final product. Her descriptive layering of practice, context and evaluation resonates for me wholeheartedly. Artwork is a site of discovery. The process of artmaking that most seduces me, however, is that the ‘answers’ are there, I just have to look in different places. ‘What am I discovering?’ and ‘What have I discovered?’ Artwork as/is research. I can inhabit a subject matter in ways that text based studies cannot.

I’d like to frame this semester with questions offered to art practitioners in a 2007 issue of the Journal of Visual Art Practice: What ‘work’ does the ‘artwork’ do? What work do I want the artwork to do? What work does it do for art practice?

This publication also led me to the Visual Intelligences Research Project, http://www.visualintelligences.com/about-the-project.html:

“The idea of visual intelligence in the context of creative practice refers to the kinds of thinking that go into envisaging, making and viewing the visual appearance of works of art. More broadly still, it refers to the kinds of thinking manifest in envisaging, making and viewing objects and artifacts of visual culture, specifically where visual appearance is important to their character and function. The project is concerned to uncover and understand these processes, and in particular to set out for review and debate the specific forms of visual intelligence operating to guide and structure creative practice in visual art. The project also seeks to understand how visual artifacts, including works of art, might embody, facilitate and convey ways of apprehending and thinking about the world that differ from other modalities of knowledge and communication, for example, oral and written language.”

Before discovering this project—the artists’ accountings of their practice particularly intrigue me— I wasn’t sure which threads of inquiries were dangling from my practice, which threads were snipped, and which threads were plain-woven into my daily existence. I will be working on following these threads.

(More questions:)

Where does an artistic act end and documentation begin?

We can’t know how far we’ve gotten in our understanding of creative processes. How do we reach beyond what we know we can do?

Exhibitionist

The work has been well received with some interesting responses. One woman told me that some of the paintings affected her emotionally, making her want to cry. Now that’s what I’m talking about! Some viewers shared their stories and interests in collecting junk. Some were completely mystified but liked the work anyway. Some loved the titles. Some just came for the wine and crudités.

Up until 3 weeks ago, most of my work was hung on every available inch of wall space throughout my small house. I was living with it, aware of it, proud of it but the relationship was not ideally situated. 10 of the works were in another gallery downtown, crammed onto two small walls and poorly labeled. An unprofessional display, sadly stated. Experiencing the collective visual statement of my work in a well lit, well conceived formal environment astonished me. For the first time I was contending with the group as a whole. Relationships of color, imagery, scale, and dimension are immediately evident and critical to orchestrate for the presentation of the work.

I discovered that my concept of a body of work had not been thoroughly realized as I made the work. While I am not disappointed in the coherence of the exhibit, I have new insight on this aspect of process. I am thinking of the next ‘body’ more thematically in concept. Another decision-making process is how to move from one painting to the next—lateral, back, forward, deeper, wider…Have I completed the research on this idea? Is there a final resolution? There is no fixed endpoint. Making ‘new’ things is a dilemma. There is an argument of the self with the self.

Across the long stretch of cultural time—five million years of human communication—defined disciplines seem somewhat out of scale.

I am the form-maker and first viewer. This is multi-dimensional activity, continuously repositioning in front of the work and bodily occupied within the work. Physically making art provides a sensual break from the intellectual deliberation. There is still a viewpoint that this is, or should, be fun. Follow your passion, do what you love, have implications of recreation, ease. I lovingly and passionately anticipate putting on my “studio clothes” and getting artwork on my hands, but it’s not usually for general amusement. It’s work.

Isn’t making art interdisciplinary by nature? Various intelligences are at work in a range of physical and mental engagement: disciplines of psychology, neurology, sociology, theology, archeology, biology, technology, history, economics, cultural…I suppose there may be a finite number that represents the calculated discipline combinations or exposures that inform my work, but the lovely mechanics of the brain sorts out enough sensory and experiential information to protect our consciousness from that deluge.

Intuition is not un-conscious or mystical. It is a form of gut-knowledge. The more work that I make, the more ‘knowing’ I am. Layers of experience embed in neural pathways and it becomes a conscious effort to recognize and respond to the fluidity of the work, the process and the practice. It’s similar to sustaining intimacies with a partner. The sensory intrigue of a new face and body, dynamic experiences, the detailed recall of every conversation sink into familiarity—the brain’s protective mechanism for sorting information and identifying potential threats—and the relationship soon requires a conscious attentiveness. The more art I make, the more effort to allow for surprise and catalysts. When coins were valued by their actual weight in gold or silver, people would bite them to see if they were genuine. I want to make art you can bite.

Art and Intention

I make art to know the world, get closer to the mysteries and because I have to. I want to know I am making visual work that cannot be transposed into language. My intention and the physical manifestation of the artwork are a negotiation.

It has always been my intention to make art that has multiple layers of meaning and access because I don’t believe there is an ideal audience. However, actual intentions are not always pertinent to define what the artwork means. The materials, colors, context, discourse and theories aren’t enough to fix the entire meaning. Meaning develops through invitation and assumption that the audience is aware of their participation in the construction of the meaning. This is an active role, not passive.

Explaining my own intention is also not neutral; my explication can put an end to an interpretative search for the work’s meaning, just as a dictionary can end the search for the meaning of a word. Similarly, reading the meaning of an artwork in a catalog is not interpreting it.

Which brings me to Gary Larsen’s Cow Tools. I know this might seem to be a stretch in such a theoretical-practice discussion, but I love the vernacular. People were both amused and outraged by Larsen’s Far Side cartoons. But, the notorious Cow Tools cartoon generated hundreds of letters wanting to know the meaning of this particular cartoon. Readers were absolutely certain the cartoon meant something and that Larsen was the one that could explain it.

It turns out that Larsen—who thinks cows are funny stand-ins for humans during common activities—recalled a college anthropology course where he learned that man was not the only animal to make or shape tools; certain primates and bird species do the same thing. The absurd scenario of his favorite cows as proud toolmakers struck him as funny. Larsen acknowledges one of the tool drawings in this cartoon also led to confusion. After reading his explanation, the cartoon is no longer amusing. Ironically, the resulting media coverage boosted his recognition and he went on to greater success.

Inspiration

Peter Doig: “When you start out, you make a painting by adding. As time goes on you realize it’s what you leave out that’s important.” Art in America, May 2008, No. 5, p.172

Substitute painting, sculpture, video, music or any form of art and art-practitioner in this excerpt of an essay written by the poet Loüise Gluck:

“What I share with [poets in my generation] is ambition; what I dispute is its definition. I do not think that more information always makes a richer poem. I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum. … It seems to me that what is wanted, in art, is to harness the power of the unfinished. All earthly experience is partial. Not simply because it is subjective, but because that which we do not know, of the universe, of mortality, is so much more vast than that which we do know. What is unfinished or has been destroyed participates in these mysteries. The problem is to make a whole that does not forfeit this power.”

Unpacking the Work

I am still playing with the materials, additive, reductive, stenciling, layering, color and light. Imagery, shapes, narratives develop from the materials and dimensions of the substrate.

Both works are 10 ¾” x 34”. Dimensions are specific to Japanese scroll and screen paintings which I’ve been looking at since I began investigating Japanese poetry. The Rimpa school of the Edo period (mid-1600s) was known for recreating themes from classical literature, bold and lavishly colored. I began and finished these 2.13.07 – 2.15.07.

Orpheus: “You’re Tougher Than I Thought”

Mixed mediums on plywood: Spray paint, water based oils, oilstick, pastel, dog food can, aluminum flashing sample chips, screws, shipping netting, film negatives

Eurydice: “I Am an Instrument in the Shape of a Woman”

Mixed mediums on plywood: Spray paint, house paint, water based oils, pastel, Liquid Nails adhesive, fiberglass screen, tree root, imitation (I think) black Tahitian pearls, aerosol can top, cut nails, telephone bell, plastic bead, sheet metal bead and waxed cord.

I honestly don’t remember the words of Rick’s poems, read at the workshop, but the story and the emotions stuck with me. I felt I needed more work for the show and I had started 2 paintings before the G2 with some field painting and colors, but nothing else. So approached these 2 paintings as Orpheus and Eurydice

I did some Internet research on the story because I had forgotten it. I came across references, feminist writings and poetry giving Eurydice a voice, control over her situation, and Eurydice as erotic. Other documentation presented the story as allegorical interpretation to fit Christian doctrine and clerical misogyny. That was very interesting to me. Orpheus represents logic, wisdom, the rational. Eurydice is human desire, pleasure, earthly delights. Orpheus loses her through the teeth of the serpent; she was bit by temptation and killed by sin. We cannot come back to life and we cannot live life without death. We have feet in both worlds.

The field colors in Orpheus represent geological and metaphorical layers/levels of above ground to below ground transition. The colors on the sample chips match the levels. There is a chart below that refers to the symbolic meanings of ‘white’. The stamped words and geometrical shape references the logic and reason aspect of Orpheus. The can-figure is split, facing up and facing down. It could be 2 aspects of the same being or Orpheus and Eurydice. The trailing hair-like bunch of strands is grabbed by the black/black sample chip. There are pieces of film negative among the strands. Originally, I had the strands looped through the vacant circle facing downwards, but I severed the overt and direct connection when I cut back the strands and left the empty space. This results in more of a tear, something more yanked.

The title for this piece is Orpheus speaking the words: “You are tougher than I thought”, which is meant to say she is harder to get over than he thought AND/OR she can handle her situation better than he realized.

The field colors in Eurydice are greens for her wood nymph persona. Green can be tenacious moss growing in shade, green of new growth, or swampy and pungent. The horizon line is way up on the top, so she is located below ground or water, tied to her position. The copper painted screen material, however, allows Eurydice to expand beyond the plane or edges of the piece and maybe her circumstances.

The ‘eye’, the look that sent her back to Hades, is nailed in place, through it’s center and is meant to evoke discomfort, staring, a fixed gaze. 70% of our information comes through the eye and seeing…There are many phrases in our experience with the words ‘see’, ‘eye’ and ‘look’ – the “look of love” comes right to mind.

The wooden burl and root refer to the wood nymph and other below-ground life transmitting conduits to above ground growth. It looks like fallopian tubes and uterus as well as a torso with arms.

The pearls are purposefully black rather than white. Black signifies the primordial darkness in Buddhism. In the realm where it is dark, because there is no light reflected, there is also a sound, which we cannot hear, as it is so high on the scale of harmonics that it is inaccessible to the hearing capacity of any physical being (so I gave her the bell). Black is also the color of hate, transmuted by the alchemy of wisdom into compassion.

The telephone bell gives Eurydice a real voice. The telephone – the bell ringing, announcing a call, a connection. We don’t have telephones with REAL bells any longer. I miss that. My daughter has never heard one ring in the house.

Among the many bell references are the ghanta bell in Buddhism, representing the female principle which symbolizes wisdom and purpose. Through the sound of the bell, Koreans tried to comprehend the Buddhist belief that all objects and living things in the universe don’t stay in one shape but continuously change form. Koreans also believed that bells had the power to subdue evil and erase sin and pain. And honestly, I was just amused by it being there.

The title is Eurydice speaking the words, “I Am an Instrument in the Shape of a Woman” which is meant to say she knows how she is used AND/OR how to use her power

Matrimonial Tallis: Never Greet Your Husband at the Door in Your Housedress and Rollers

Wall Hanging, approx 48" x 48"

Mixed mediums and materials: fold-out sofa bed mattress support, dog food can lids, red wire, silver wire, oil pastel, fiberglass screen, cushion springs, ceramic tile, enamel paint curtain pleat hooks, drapery pins, rolled sheet metal. Completed 2.17.09

In 1999, I first hung the mattress support, squarely, on a wall in my living room because I liked the grid quality of it. I intended to use it as a location for hanging mementos and other meaningful bits, to create an evolving 3-D scrapbook representing my daughter and me. I saw a silly movie, Man of the House, from which I borrowed this idea. I never got beyond hanging it on the wall and took it down a year later. In September 2006, my daughter was scheduled to dorm at college, so I turned her bedroom into my studio (she commuted instead, so we share the 10 x 10 space) and hung the grid up in the shape that reminded me of tribal skins or ceremonial robe hangings. Or ‘70s macramé hangings,

The discs are dog can lids I burned in a 55 gallon drum barrel and then let sit in the weather to rust, which speeds up the process. When I forget they’re out there they disintegrate. The lids are attached with red wire. Collecting the lids as I fed my dogs and rusting them took some time; there are 160.

For a year that’s as far as I got. It started with plain abstraction: the silhouette, the beauty of the rust and the pose of the structure. The middle section stumped me. I thought it might turn into an oracle- with messages or images on the reverse of the lids, hanging away from a wall. Everything I attempted to add to this piece was overwrought, obvious, or didn’t fit the visual and mythical logics. There were too many circles, too much rust, too geometric, natural fibers= too obvious, typewriter keys= too literal (!) … I thought this piece would just live in that unfinished realm with no further adornment or interference from me.

When I was chosen for this February exhibit (March 2008) I envisioned this artwork on the far wall, the ‘impact’ wall, as you enter the gallery. As the date got closer, this piece became more critical for me to resolve because I still had that vision of this piece on that wall. It felt like a battle of intentions.

I returned home from this G2 residency with 10 days left to finish my body of work. 2.7.09 I visited the gallery to pick up my postcard announcements, and saw handmade Hand of Fatima and evil eye charms in a nearby shop. Immediately I tried these symbols (more abstracted) for my piece and they worked. The cultural, tribal, protective idea of the robe took on a stronger resonance. The symbols are related to my Jewish heritage and so my robe became a Tallis. In the Torah, there is a commandment to wear "fringes", known as tzitzit, on all garments of a certain size or larger, which have at least four corners. These fringes are knotted in a specific way and represent the 613 mitzvahs, or commandments, given in the Torah. During prayers, the custom is to wear a large rectangular garment with tzitzit (tallis gadol) and pray while wrapped in it. There are different customs as to when this is done. Most Ashekenazi (Eastern European) men will begin wearing the tallis when they get married. There are some communities that begin this earlier. Customs vary among liberal Jews as to who wears a tallis—women—and when it's worn. Every effort of adding knotted fringes to this piece looked strained and I stopped pushing the fringes. I’ve got wire instead.

The entire title for this piece came at the same time as the tallis concept. Never Greet Your Husband at the Door in Your Housedress and Rollers was a phrase my Mother used repeatedly, to caution me on how to keep a husband and keep him interested. To a young girl, it made perfect sense to make the effort to look and feel beautiful. There aren’t enough pages in this packet to discuss what that perspective, perception, cultural version of women meant and still means personally, as well as universally. I can tell you it’s still baggage I drag around, but at 47, it’s got wheels! And now lids. Good- another reference.

The center portion was still empty and all my efforts clogged the rhythm of the piece. During the following week, I was grabbing stuff by the boxful from my shed to throw at this work. I took apart the cushion inner springs and spiraled them on the center portion. In a subtle way, the springs both fill and keep the space open, giving a sense of motion, suggesting a way in and way out of the work. They seem as if they are capable of collecting or emitting sound. Other references could be the spiral shape of the galaxy, surface waves, the cochlea of the inner ear…Then I painted them a royal blue with white striping, which has an aboriginal look and breaks up the visual plane of the spiral when the piece hangs against a white wall.

The “hooks” along the top always looked like the body and leg silhouette of cranes or herons in flight. So the fiberglass screen wings made sense. Someone saw them as dragonflies. OK. What I like about the screen material is the moiré pattern that occurs, also giving movement and lightness to that area.

I decided to add the yellow and white cross marks on the lids at this point. I had researched and used this symbol in other works and had been looking at pictures in my Primitivism books:

Rubin, William Stanley, and Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.). Primitivism in 20th Century Art; Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. Vol. I and Vol. II. Museum of Modern Art, 1984.

29:1 · The wheel cross, sun cross, Odin's cross or Woden's cross. Nordic Odin and Teutonic Wuotan or Woden was the supreme god of the Nordic religion before Christianity. Odin was the god of art, culture, warfare, and the dead; depicted as an old, one-eyed man with two ravens as his intelligence agents and messengers. The structure is one of the first non-pictorial graphs to appear when humankind was on the threshold of the Bronze Age. It is common on rock carvings. It appears in ancient Egypt, China, pre-Columbian America, and the Near East. From the facts available it seems as if it is associated with the wheel, not so much with its invention as with its revolutionary effect on the existing society. In ancient China this sign was associated with thunder, power, energy, head, and respect. When the first ideographic writing systems were developed, was included among the signs. It appears in the earliest systems of writing used by the Egyptians, Hittites, Cretians, Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans. In ancient Greece it signified a sphere or globe. It was also used as a natal chart pattern in ancient astrology. In modern astrology it is the sign for the planet Earth, the astrological element earth, and Fortuna, the Part of Fortune, an important position in the natal chart related to progress and hindrances in the material aspect of an individual's life. It is easy to trace a shift in this sign's meaning over time. In earliest times was a symbol for the highest power, the sun, and its counterpart, the king. It represented power and control. This meaning changed so As has been its custom, the Christian Church has included this ancient pagan sign among the crosses of its symbolism. It is known as the gamma cross, the Roman Catholic cross, the consecration cross and the inauguration cross. At the inauguration of a church, the bishop, using blessed water or oil, draws the wheel cross at 12 different places on the church walls. Its use as a halo or gloria, i.e. the spiritual power or energy that holy persons emanate, is associated with its original meaning as a sign of power. During the Middle Ages the alchemists used it to signify copper appears in about 15 modern ideographic systems. In some US meteorological systems it has been used to indicate that visibility is worsened by fog or dust. In some British meteorological systems it can mean a solar halo, i.e. a ring around the sun. In modern ideography it is often related to visibility and signaling. Thus on modern German maps it can stand for radar station. In the US, British, Swedish and French hobo sign systems we find that it means here you will find food, work, and money, or here live generous people. Excerpted from http://www.symbols.com/encyclopedia/29/291.html

References for the colors chosen in this work:


Color	Blue	White	Red	Yellow
General Meanings	coolness, infinity, ascension, purity, healing	learning, knowledge, purity, longevity	life force, preservation, the sacred, blood, fire	rootedness, renunciation, earth
Emotion, Action	killing, anger	rest and thinking	subjugation and summoning	restraining and nourishing
Transforms:	anger into mirror-like wisdom	delusion of ignorance into wisdom of reality	delusion of attachment into the wisdom of discernment	pride into wisdom of sameness
Body Part	ears	eyes	tongue	nose
Element	air	water	fire	earth

By 2.16 I had everything accomplished on this piece except how to the finish the outer edges. Nothing was making sense and I had to deliver the work Tuesday morning.

I came home from teaching all day, had to frame my last four paintings, help unload and take home my friend’s pickup truck, and print up wall text/labels for some of the pieces. Late Monday night, I was still trying several things including busting open old cassette tapes and hanging the tape like fringes on the two outer edges. Horrible. I surrendered. I let go of my vision for the exhibit. I went to bed.

Tuesday morning I went into the studio (Jessi was sleeping) to gather some things to bring with me and I looked at the Tallis briefly, affirming my surrender to banging the piece into submission. The way to finish it- happened. No other way to describe it. It didn’t bubble or strike, it just happened. The solution was a shining row of can lids on each end that hadn’t been processed. They would be reminiscent of the shiny veneer; a surface quality. The opposite of edges that tend to get worn out first. Maybe they were replaced. Or maybe the decay began in the center and worked it’s way outward. If the tallis could be worn (wrapped around) the shiny lids would meet down the center. I loved all the ambiguity.

I had been too hell bent on artwork to do my recycling and I was able to scrounge 26 lids from the bin. I was feverishly hammering the popped tops flat at 7:00 am (waking Jessi of course) and hanging them. It worked. The piece is now hung as envisioned and has been well received.

This was a culmination of working in the studio for 3 days in a row and coming out with 2 new paintings and the wall hanging. The moral of this story: I’m not sure which lesson there is to learn here. I tried various ways to participate in the evolution of this work; some were passive, like sitting with it and being empty or some were active, like trying on every idea until I found ones that fit. Maybe it was a lesson in confidence; I felt an incredible sensation of being able to reach beyond what I know I can do. The Greeks called it “daimon”, the Romans “genius”, the 5^th century Christians “guardian angel”, William Hogarth named it “grace” (1753) and leaping across 250+ years, today we use such terms as “following your passion”. Maybe it was my spiritual counterpart wagging its finger at me.

This has been my first experiment with more of a sculptural piece, however, I’m still attached to the wall! I don’t see myself working sculpturally, in a total 3-D sense. That spacial sensibility doesn’t inspire me. My combination of painting and dimensional objects on one substrate meshes with and allows movement between the layers of meaning and physical textures or dimensions that I’m working to achieve.

Things I Can Count On

2009-01-29T21:37:00.000-05:00

There are some things you can count on:

Hoover and Luci see me off for my 2nd residency.

I don't pack lightly.

Snow in Vermont in January. Measured in feet, not inches.

A nice surprise: I was able to get my single in the same dorm and room I had last semester.

More books...

Noise control...

Going to MFA Camp!!! 1.29.09

2009-01-26T21:39:00.001-05:00

I'm officially a G2. I'm such a big girl, now.