01 July 2009

the mac and the mic



so long the list grows, and how quietly this blog slips further down it.

here i find myself, on this foggy july first. a terrifying freedom, my life has, and i am grateful, and i continue to wish for some sight into the unknown.

meanwhile, i am humbled by my new job, teaching film-making and screenwriting to a class of developmentally disabled adults. i didn't predict this new trajectory in my life, but (at least) through september i'll be on it. continually learning, often overwhelmed.

and more news: i was reluctant to join this twitter phenomenon for so long, but then suddenly i wasn't. it fascinates me now that this site, this era we're in, even exists. so yes, i have taken up micro-blogging: here's my page and i would love to see whomever may be reading this over there. the short spurt style of it, crosslink show-n-tell, and the 140 character limit excites me. and of course the voyeurism! it's a lot like looking into a fast-moving river, staying still but watching it go by, all the muttering and the complaining and exclaiming and so much more. when something like michael jackson's sudden death happens the sheer volume of the voices was stunning.

and back on earth i am taking part in an art show called "Inside Out" at the Notre Dame Wiegand Gallery, their summer show. info here. i'll believe i'll have two paintings in the show, and a some doll hospital patients will be making a field trip there as well for installation. the opening is Friday July 10th and the show's up through august 7th.

however, if anyone heads down there let me know so i can point you towards the REAL attraction at notre dame, which is a family of deer.

~


18 April 2009

10 days, suspended.

hello from the east coast. have only had a few brief moments online and to top it off, i lost my cell phone somewhere in the san francisco airport in the hustle. a welcome cut-off in many ways, but anxiety-provoking in others. 

anyhow, a friend sent me this little film of two stop-motion projects in one, and i thought this audience of artists may find it as delightful as i did:  


wolf/pig stop-motion animation


~


26 March 2009

for everything there is a season


hello! somewhere in my daze of late i've failed to notice, really notice, that as of this weekend it is now spring!

onward.

finally feel like i've moved past residual show-crash...largely to do with the dialogue over these blogs (thank you!) and a lovely conversation with robbyn about using my reactions as feedback for where to talk the art next. thanks, all. i tend to really dive into experiencing hard emotions, then let them through and out. the former came naturally since i was a child; the latter isn't instinctual to me but i've been consciously cultivating the skills for 15 years or so...but more to learn, always.

the other reason i'm ready to move on is i have shit to do! like job searching and getting outside today to enjoy the warmth.




p.s. took this photo in brooklyn in the summer, just a mere few minutes before being screamed at by a stranger!)


~

24 March 2009

coming to.

both light and dark are happening right now...i might as well end on the positive so here goes. i uploaded this photo last night when i thought of starting a new entry at the witching hour and what turned out to be the end of a month-long insomnia run (hallelujah!!!!). it's from a water tower in central new york...a while ago now, maybe 3 yrs? i'd forgotten all about it. i think i've been checked out the past two days since the show, kind of spent. i remember my first year of college an actor friend telling me after a school production that she had 'post-partum depression' after her play was over, that her stomach literally ached as if she'd given birth. (being childless i guess she didn't know it's more than the stomach that aches...but then again i am childless too so don't ask me.) but now i get what she meant!

i'm also trying not to sink into feeling unsatisfied with how my piece turned out, but it's been hard not to go there. it was so incomplete, despite the crazy amount of stuff. and so overwhelming to deal with so many objects!! i am longing for the most simplest forms now. monochrome. no novels, just haiku.

or, if i ever do set that up again, maybe at the end people just come take what they want, at least. i accumulated a LOT of stuff with my project and organizing it now feels like stuffing a jack-in-the-box back into its box, but an oversized jack that REALLY doesn't want to go back in. very tempted just to drive to the nearest salvation army and drop off all these dolls. or maybe i will just get uber-organized with it into labeled boxes and put it all to rest for a while. but the ideas for it keep coming. i think of some new thing and then just want to scream for it to shut up-- enough already!! this project feels kind of like a monster...mary shelly captured it best, that feeling of birthing something that then has a life of its own. (more birth analogies, god help us all.)



now, on to the positive. i was SO amazed and impressed by all of your work! so many surprises in the final execution. the show came together so nicely-- rich, provocative, beautiful. my only complaint is that we didn't get a chance to kick back after the show and get closure, come down, debrief, however you want to put it, etc...i guess we'll just have to crash otto's show and do it there instead. :)


~

18 March 2009

a wanna-be e.t.


as you can see, my cat has made friends with the dolls. but i...am feeling overwhelmed. i came back early from my trip (at the tune of $150 cancellation fee per each of the two flights that i had bought to route me back here-- damn those airlines and their schemes!), hoping to get grounded and finish what i set out to do, but i fear my vision for this show is too ambitious. so many small things need to come together, and at each turn i just think of more-- larger-- things i want to do. my task for tonight is to stay with what's here and let what needs to fall away, fall away. for now.

i also have serious questions about my film. i think it's interesting (not 100% done yet), but picturing it in my installation, i'm wondering about overstimulating the viewer. i have 4 senses already engaged with my piece, and one might argue i have the fifth (taste) slightly triggered with the candy medicine that will be on display, so i'm worried i will overwhelm with busy-ness and visual clutter. by the way, i wish i could figure out how to upload a song clip on an entry because i am really excited about the sound element i'm bringing into the hospital. it involves a music box that i found inside one of the dolls (in her stomach when you twist her at the waist) and a vintage kids' xylophone from an antique store in pacifica.

any thoughts about keeping vs. scrapping the film most appreciated!


~

13 March 2009

annette messager
















i can't believe i stared at this for so long and didn't see the word 'secret.'

by the way, these sample photographs aren't posted in the chronological order of creation but rather just a happenstance as i uploaded...but upon re-looking, this juxtaposition ended up giving me another way to view them, the leitmotifs and weaves, a pacing that holds its own dimension for me intrinsic to yet separate from the content.  i am adding this post to my file of inspiration.

10 March 2009


editing this film strip is...um...interesting. it seemed obvious i'd need to throw narrative out the window, but the colors and patterns kind of appear show up with their own legible arc-- one that needs a shaping, though. now it's my task to learn a new literacy.




what's more is i have no idea what i'm doing with imovie, and was hoping to talk some friend into a tutoring exchange but i'm leaving town for family business and won't have time beforehand. i have to leave this thursday night after our class--  yikes! So editing will be all about trial, error, and fiddling with the buttons on that program. and my work space will be all about the airplane. maybe the troposphere environment will end up helping? and i'm sure my self-consciousness regarding the other passengers' potential eyes on my screen will add a new twist, too, but i think i welcome the challenge. in fact, i'm sort of excited about this-- a change of scenery could do the work good. maybe i'll even get some interesting feedback from a flight attendant while he/she charges me $15 for a tiny bag of crackers. 

~


09 March 2009

altered book project & other thoughts


having no room to do art at all in my tiny shared apartment, i set up a folding card table in the one free floor spot of the living room, thus blocking off the fireplace. i am thinking lately about concepts of make-shift art space and also how our conditions shape our process. artists throughout human history have created no matter their circumstances, right? they make due whether or not they have the perfect materials, whether or not their lives were jeopardized because of it.


not at all a comparable hardship but for years (especially the 10 years i have lived in pricey but small san francisco apartments) i have had to make art that i could clean up afterwards, causing me to move from oil paint to acrylic for its quick drying time. and, despite my very organized nature in all other areas of life, in art-making i continue to lean towards the haphazard, and the surrender that goes along with it. i collect many found objects to be put into pieces later -- i have accepted that i am just a collector (of stories, words, books, facts, images, objects)-- it isn't convenient, but i am this no matter where i am. in an ideal world i would like to have a room with many shelves so that i could see what i've accrued. as my space is now, however, this isn't possible. so i squirrel things away in semi-organized boxes, not remembering what i've gathered. i mean literally, i cannot remember the object a mere second after i've closed the box. it's quite strange. then i have no time to really look through things in the small chunks of time i have for art making so i've adopted a grab-bag style of it, just putting my arm into a dark box and seeing what comes up. it's like receiving a gift every time. it's also VERY maddening, but illuminating too.


speaking of illuminating, ever seen the film 'everything is illuminated?' i was so jealous of those carefully labeled bagged objects, the uniform (albeit dusty) boxes on their shelves. if i have to be this collector person that i am, the painstaking and meticulous process displayed in that film would be attractive in many ways. but a different creative process and not really my style. i used to lament this, but now i surrender. to who i am, how my brain is organized -- the beauty and the magic in it.


anyway, back to my point about creating art no matter the circumstances. while creating this altered book journal i found myself returning to a familiar, well-worn groove. couldn't place my finger on it at first but then i realized the process is one i've been doing for years. children don't understand why they are drawing what they're drawing, and yet, they do...so i learned early how to censor. too many people, for so many reasons, learn this censoring. it's sad. the disparaging of self-expression is all to common....but i've noticed that the truth of children seeps out somehow. perhaps the truth of all of us, especially us artists.


an example of my own censoring process is how around age 12 i started writing fictional journals instead of a first-person, confiding-style diary like most other kids write at that age. they were completely made up-- a different girl altogether with different friends, living within a different geography, getting different grades and i even crafted the folded notes she received from her friends. i vicariously got a break from my own straight-A pressure as i wrote about her flunking out. i loved making it, and so then started others. i made collages of images from other children's points of views, and then collages of words which blended with my practice of writing poetry. it was a meditation on otherness, in a way. and it was probably also a way to develop my compassion, because i would imagine hardships that other people were experiencing (or appropriate hardships i'd learned about in school, on the news, in books, etc) and i would really delve in and write while imagining how that would affect their thoughts and feelings. however, something obvious was missing: my own point of view. i had a deficit of that. my late teens and adulthood so far have been about reclaiming that, and struggling to develop a compassion towards myself as much as for others (after all, it is impossible for true kindness to work any other way...).


in terms of my art, for years i only expressed myself in this very coded form. i found myself writing this line, sometimes underneath layers of paint so nobody would see it: listen to what i'm not saying. obscurity became my genre as a child, in my writing as well as my visual art. it was from this disposition that i came to abstract art, and simultaneously to experimental playwriting, fiction, and poetry. it is where i found myself this winter, creating yet another piece with the themes of secrecy, the fragility of messages, and elusive, aged truth. i'm embracing the idea that what was never spoken can maybe never be spoken like it would have been originally, and sometimes can only be whispered and even then perhaps never heard. i am exploring the questions of whether the telling itself is important, and to what extent the listening/receiving of the telling is crucial, and how the two inter-relate.


in terms of the written word and my relationship with it, i remember a writing teacher told me i wouldn't be popular in the mainstream (a hard comment to hear as a college student who secretly wished herself famous) but then i listened beyond ego to what she was really saying. i asked her to say more. she rephrased: you won't have many readers, but the readers that you have will read you fiercely. i thinking i am finding/have found those readers, and those writers too. the coded/uncoded ones who speak a gut-heart-truth. i like a writer who respects their reader enough to make them work. and i like writing that warrants re-reading, and re-reading again. pay-off and peeling layers.


i am working on a story about an artist who writes letters to her unborn granddaughter within her paintings, somewhere between the layers such that it may or may not be legible when (and if) they eventually get peeled off. she thinks that when the paint peels, the warp of the writing will create a poetry in itself that this imagined daughter will make sense of in a way that helps her to live more authentically.


this old woman writes the letters with the deep hope that her granddaughter will find and read these letters, but yet doesn't do something clear and straight-forward like writing a typed letter or making a video of herself speaking. also, she doesn't even know if she will ever even have a granddaughter. she has one son but she is terminally ill and he has no plans to have kids yet. before she dies, she will give the message to her son to pass down to his daughter, should she exist at all in the future. she will trust that her son won't open the letter himself that has the directions about how to chip away the paintings, and, her son being the upright and honorable person he is, he won't. however, he may lose it in a gust of wind. and so, like so many, our messages become treasure hunts for people in the future. or for nobody at all. or maybe the only person 'reading' is the reader of the story i'm writing. or maybe nobody will even read that story because either i will never finish it or it will never be published, in which case the only people receiving this woman's untold/half re-told/warped and yet still untold hidden story is: you.


anyway, that's all an aside. this blog entry is becoming mammoth!! yikes. let me finish so i can get to the beach to exercise and home before sunset.


as i was saying...


the space of autobiography, for me, needs to be inhabited by one. for now. and thus i am still protective of my unshared truths. i thought i was finally riding a departure from my genre when i started this intermedia class, but found myself in familiar territory once again. it's just where i am most comfortable, this terrain of the unspoken. i guess there's more to be left unsaid.


and it's not a bad thing, per se. there are, perhaps, more of us riddled speakers than not, and probably especially within the visual arts community.


today i revisit these themes from a very different intention than i did as a child. then the codes were very much about hiding, about not being found out. now i have no wish to hide. i still sometimes speak in codes but with the attitude of a linguist; with the intention of understanding my own language and allowing others to understand it too. increasingly, my coded messages reach my own ears, eyes, spirit, mind, and heart, and this is where my art-making is the most meaningful to me. me reaching myself. it is probably my only current measure of 'success.'


there are times when people make art without knowing why and people see it and are moved, also not knowing why, and there is a tacit understanding between us all, despite it all, right? or often someone's precious truth we mishear and paste our own reality on top of. but so what. the making is for the maker, really.


i don't feel like looking back on this entry and editing it because i just feel like getting outside, but i'm also looking forward to this evening when i will finally have time to work on the stuff for the intermedia show. i do a lot of staring at computer screens for my other work and my eyes need a rest.


and so again i'll find myself tearing up books, pictures, creating an altered book journal like i did when i was 12. i'll most likely layer and paint. but also, as i write this today i am remembering that back then it wasn't just for therapy or for some profound development of my childhood angst that i liked doing this stuff in the first place. i wasn't so self-aware. it was just...fun.



~

25 February 2009

an excuse for dreaming

being home with the flu the past few days, i thought i'd be able to catch up on some work but ended up too sick and listless to move instead. first i lamented over the waste of time with my many pending deadlines and felt guilty for lying there...but i got the gift of watching the sky as the fog rolled over the city from the ocean and pushed out the sun, and then the colors and movement as day moved into dusk. what resulted was something i rarely allow myself: time to think. no, rather: time to dream. i forgot how much this is part of the creative process.









~

22 February 2009

relentless coughing and insomnia in the doll hospital

is what caused THIS to happen:




(hand-made this doll...patient #1)


~

12 February 2009

projections

while driving last night i saw this burger king sign -- snapped it quickly with my camera phone since i was at a traffic light. wish it came out better, actually i'm surprised it came out at all, my phone being fairly crapalicious coupled with my looming panic/awareness i was at the one short red light in all of the world and late to get somewhere. but phew, i got it. at least you can still see the sign with the burnt out B, R, and KING, leaving one word ablaze: URGE.

was this the work of some stealth kamikaze fast food employee bored on the job or better yet, who took the job for the sole purpose of unscrewing these lightbulbs in this formation? or is this artist just that artist that so frequently creates beautiful and brilliant works that awe and confound us, the artist of many names and no name at all? just saying "the" artist as if singular is questionable to me, but so it goes.

as a poet and playwright i am continuously thinking about the interface between text and image within the arts.
i remember one distinct time of being stunned and affected by a site-specific text piece. it was the day i was walking near dublin's trinity college-- i walked along a cobblestone street, turned a corner and stopped short, gasped. high up on a stone wall before me was an installed strip of words in fluorescent lights: "i wouldn't give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning." being a petulant college student who contemplated dropping out on a daily basis, this was a perfect mirror of my feelings at the time. i took a photograph of it, and then decided to stay in school.

that quote, by the way, is taken from a soliloquy by james joyce: "I wouldn’t give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why don’t they go and create something..." there were other
similar snippets of text around trinity college, too. when i have a chance to dig up the photos i'll post them here.

i love the appropriation, reappropriation, and reinterpretations of great literary works, book nerd that i am.

and then there's jenny holzer, one of my all-time favorite artists. her projections, for one thing. look at this one from the new york series! breathtaking.

also, being a student of psychology i can't help but think about film (all film) in terms of projection=projection.

that is all.


~

09 February 2009

image inspiration

some images i saw while walking around san franciso.

ideas for 3D art and possibly 4D art are unfolding...more on this later.

on the heels of these devlopments i saw a fluxus film at the SFMOMA today. er, yesterday. (it's going on 4am now and as usual i'm at odds with my insomnia.)



shoe garden, gay marriage


toddler pushing swing in potrero hill


an inside-out house. hurts my heart to think about what this person may be going through. (porous in the world as usual, no matter what armor i attempt....)


blank paper for kids to fill outside red poppy art gallery, 23rd street


advice for strangers


~

02 February 2009

movement meets biography

photo from Spark*(KQED Arts)

i just saw this show last night at dance mission theatre and though the show closed last night, i want to write about it here anyway because i bet it will re-emerge again, it being AMAZING and also just a weekend run but had 5 sold-out shows with many people turned away. keep your eye out for future runs or tours to other cities if you live somewhere other than the sf bay area.

the show tells the story of lou sullivan, transgendered female-to-male activist and pioneer who has an important place in san francisco history. sean dorsey read his journals and papers archived in the SF library, and then wrote this piece as a tribute/response.

i am a huge fan of sean dorsey's choreography. before seeing his work i don't think i could truly appreciate the way that movement can tell a story. there is such tenderness in the way he translates story to words, then words to movement. ways that are utterly surprising and yet make so much sense it feels like putting on an old familiar shirt. i find him a thoughtful, thorough, gentle, and brave artist.

seeing performance (or witnessing any art, really) always makes me think, and this time was no different...i found myself thinking about more than what the piece conjured up, though. like about my own relationship with performance. and how much i don't connect to this strange phenomenon we call 'applause.' for me, it's jarring and so automatically done that there are times i question its authenticity. at this particular show the energy of the audience was apparent; they were moved, glowing with their appreciation, so that when they clapped it carried that message with it, but there are times this isn't so. i've heard people say they sometimes clap out of happiness the show is over, for example. and so this makes me wonder: am i partial to the visual arts because experiencing it is generally a quiet, introspective experience? and where is the translation of applause in the visual art world? how does an artist (who isn't famous and receiving constant reviews, etc.) receive feedback from their audience? and artists are the ultimate see-ers, so for many there must be something fulfilling about being seen, no? is true for me? i think i have a very complicated relationship to being seen, but that's another entry for another time.

there was one aspect of the sean dorsey show that didn't sit right with me and it wasn't that the device didn't work in the art (because it really did work) as much as a reminder of the way i experience the world. i am a very different storyteller, for one. and the premise of the piece was that it is hard to know a person when they are gone (aka dead), but you can get to know them, possibly even better than you ever would have alive, if you do one thing: read their diary. well, read their many diaries, which hopefully they have left behind to be read.

so, for the record (this will have to do as my living will for the moment until i can make a real one)-- i cannot and will not be understood by my diaries. hopefully i will live long enough to have time to keep them for my own reflection but then burn them before they are read by anyone else, but we can't always choose when and where we die. but either way, i don't think a person always tells the whole truth of what they are living and experiencing in the simple pages of a journal. at least, i don't. not in letters either. we are all so many layers of experiences in any given moment. so if you want to know the truth of who i was when i die, cut up my journals into tiny pieces, put them back together in a different, random order, and then maybe you will have more of a sliver of the truth of who i was. or better yet, splice them in a pile with every photograph i've ever taken, every drawing, every film, every moment i was captured on film or otherwise, perhaps also every film, song, painting, etc that has moved me, and....well, you get the idea.

~

23 January 2009

shift; intermedia



yay for the new intermedia class!! per the class assignment, will now use this blog to chart/reflect as i go.

side note: conjured up this old photo i took of the poster on jamie's ceiling because i need some sort of reminder. especially in light of this exciting week and obama's speech about the importance of being of service, i feel so selfish taking an art class. such unnecessary guilt, but the voice in my head can't help but ask: what about helping people? of all times to drop it! of all times to just sit around and create random artifacts instead of rolling up your sleeves and getting busy with the rebuilding of the nation.

but breathe: this is exactly the right time to make art (and artifacts) -- what time isn't? being a creative person does not mean being selfish. it will feed into the helping others. just trust.

~


15 January 2009

submerge

new idea: books in water.

~

01 January 2009

under the pavement, the beach


two san francisco portraits:






walking with a camera in this city -- one of my best things to do...