failed silkscreens and why do i worry about not being part of that?

Can you guess which one's the model? Obviously these did not turn out quite as expected. Not so bad considering it's a first in screen printing. In fact we should rather be patting me on the back for trying something new rather than trembling in the corner paralyzed within the bizarre boundaries I set up for myself. I think I should also be happy that this design came out of and is for the art collective I belong to, despite it's disheveled geographically-disorienting condition right now.

I have often been asking myself recently if no one really wants to make arts together. I've been trying to rally local creative spirits as well as old school friends and my supposed art collectiv comrades. This is not to say anything of judgment on these fine and noble folks, but rather to remark on how hard it really is to make collaborative work. It might be easier if I was actually living in a city but I'm not so sure about this (ie aren't people misanthropic and alienated everywhere? AND wasn't I the most depressed and reclusive while I lived in Portland, the "city of every artist"?).

I picked up my new Artforum the other day (a necessary delivery to my PO Box that makes me feel like there is a world outside Vermont, however undesirable). Low and behold- an article on Red76's Ghosttown by Matthew Stadler. It was quite a terrific article as it was self-consciously cozying up to the challenge of ephemeral community interaction art being almost impossible to circumscribe with artsy-critical blah blah blah. I particularly liked Matthew's quote from Charles Ludlam, describing how, in these types of art situations, you become "a living mockery of your own ideals... if not, you've set your ideals too low." This one phrase saves the article from going too far in it's almost-accusation of Ghosttown as being "shallow". Now, I'm sad I wasn't in Portlandia to witness Red76's Clothing Swap and Open Kitchen, but the commonality of it gives me the sensation that I can easily imagine exactly how it went down. The beauty of the universal experience. I feel comforted and inspired, not because I actually witnessed the art, but simply because I know it happened.

I often feel as if all the people around me are the artists and their interactions are the "real" art. Why can't I let go of my artsy critical blah blah blah, I ask myself? It can't be as simple as "the teachers did it to me". No no no, the teachers only tapped into and fed a fire that was burning a long time before that. Perhaps even longer than I've been alive. I am only an incarnation of some universal anxiety, pulsing constantly in its attempts to make meaning (as if it wasn't already there). Resolution: I will try to "wing it" more often.

It Is Difficult

Don't you hate when you think you've picked up on something totally original and it ends up you've stolen something from someone that they didn't even make up? No? Well, it's not that humiliating actually because we are all kind of stealing from everyone all the time. The detective work I had to go through (not really that hard) ended up being slightly more interesting than my project.

In '03, during my Reed days I skipped to the other side of town with the good ole art department to hear a lecture by Alfredo Jarr. For those of you who don't know his work, Alfredo Jarr is a Chile-born New Yorker whose contemporary installation-performative-temporal work deals with political current issues around the world. Unlike so much of so-called political art Jarr's imagery speaks directly to human suffering or complicated layers of just living in a visually stunning powerful way. My favorite pieces include a work he did in Europe (country?) with a group of locals whose only source of income in the town was a paper mill. There was no cultural place of community gatherings so he built a gallery/library of sorts entirely out of paper made at the mill. The entire community helped to build the building. When they were finished they invited the press and a government official to the opening of the community center. Then he promptly burnt it down. The claim made was that a community could not just invite an outsider artist in to produce a sense of "art" or "community" in a region where these practices weren't already sustained in some way. Another project, speaking a little more directly to a specific political-social situation was a performance he orchestrated on the border between the United States and Mexico. A hotly disputed topic and an equally sad location was the setting of two violinists, playing the same tune on either side of the fenced border. Families of people who had tried to cross the border illegally and died doing so gathered on either side. A simultaneous moment of silence was observed and then a massive net full of balloons was released, rising above the border and mingling, for everyone to see. It was unbelievable just seeing the pictures.

The name of the lecture was "It Is Difficult". At the time I had no idea why. It is difficult to be a mill worker? It is difficult to be an illegal immigrant? It is difficult to be alive? It was so broad and such an intense phrase, it had to mean more than any reference I could draw between it and the intentions of the pieces he shared with us. It stuck with me since then as a good phrase. A stocky phrase. Something personal and universal all at the same time.

When I began cutting letters out last summer I didn't know what kind of phrase I wanted. This one simply popped back into my head after so long of being stored. It perhaps came after a conversation I had with my dear and only friend in Santa Cruz, Colin. Colin and I liked to talk about how difficult it is to talk about being, existing, the inability and destructive powers of words to reference awakening and indeed enlightenment. Colin so often liked to remind me that my ego was way out of line. We always ended these conversations with confusion, silence, but a tingly feeling of closeness that happens only when two people try to communicate with each other with little success.. Once he simply ended by saying, it is difficult. And I agreed. It is difficult.

I produced the mirage of dancing letters in my yard shortly after Colin and I had that conversation (in the same yard) picnicking on tofu something under the avocado tree. It was really the only semi cool meaningful thing I made during my stay in Santa Cruz. Is this because I was an emotional wreck? Is it because my studio was the corner of our 10X6 living/dining room smushed in between the door and the couch? Is it because it is indeed difficult to make, to breath, to live?

When I started posting my pictures I realized I had no idea why Alfredo Jarr had named his lecture that. I went to his website (www.alfredojarr.net) and immediately discovered that his opening page starts "It is difficult" as if a typewriter is directly typing courier font right onto the webpage. But it continues, and I'll type the whole thing here:

it is difficult
to get the news
from poems
yet men die miserably
every day
for lack
of what is found
there

William Carlos Williams


William Carlos Williams! Now I'm not a very smart or well-read person but I do know the joys of WCW and the excited look my literati hubby gets when he talks about WCW. With a quick google I found the name of the entire poem-- Asphodel, That Greeny Flower (1955) --of which it is only one short stanza.

I have no idea what the entire poem is about. I think it might be about WCW's love for his wife. Unfortunately it is still sitting in my stack of books to read underneath Crime and Punishment and my yoga homework assignments. I have a feeling I will find meaning in it however. This is one of those searches that reeks of promise and direction. I desperately hope that what I find there will shed light on my making. Perhaps it will replay my anguished search for an outdated light bulb for my SA retro lamp that never ended up working anyway. But hopefully it will inspire something clever, illuminating, or just validating. I'm still wondering if it is really that difficult. Stay tuned.

Text in The Hall

I like cutting out big letters and writing things on the wall of my house. With that said, here is a project that exhibits my need to write meaningless things in big visual ways. Soon I will have some old projects up that exhibit this, um, tendency. The words in this project are a bit difficult to read from the pictures. They are meant to be read while going up and down the stairs. Some viewers can spot it immediately and for others it is more of a meditative process to figure out what the words spell. For those of us in the second category, I will tell you that they say: "up up up we are all going up always" and "down down down we are all going down always". I wonder if there is a difference in the brains of the people that can read it quickly versus the brains of the folks that need a bit longer??? In either case the text is meant to correlate directly to the simple motions of going up and down the stairs. In this interpretation I am intending to simply draw awareness to our daily movements. In a larger sense the text also relates to the movements of our minds and the relativity of points of view. I may conceive of myself as going down or going up (in life) but perhaps these are not real differences in my life situations. Rather, they are labels I somewhat arbitrarily attach to give a false sense of meaning and direction to my life situation.

Stencils, Prints, and Crafts Galore

My my, it's quite hard to put things in categories. I have been all over the place in the making of things that this might be a post that proves to be the dumping ground for all my experiments. I have been finding a lot of joy in stencilling recently as well as this new aesthetic I'm developing here in Vermont. This may explain the animal themes. Plus, as we all know, animals are very in right now. Another Vermont factor is that there are some hard core crafters here. They don't fuck around. None of this contemporary, "I'm just gonna use the idea of craft because it reminds me of the 60's" bullshit. (Don't get me wrong, all I am is a contemporary crafter)...but man, if you really want to see dedication, if you really want to see neurotic, obsessive compulsive behavior, come to Vermont and we'll take a tour. I met a weaver the other day who was so excited to see me in her shop. She was inviting me to classes, selling me cloth goods, while simultaneously knitting, weaving, and spinning, all the while jumping up and down for the love of craft. My hero. My other hero, I realize, is my mom, who was also a weaver while I was growing up. I wish I had inherited just a tad bit more of her...I don't even know what to call it...patience???

Anyway, first up we have some old stencils I did that first got me excited about crafting. They are called "Birds of Wisdom"

2. Here are some of my stencil friends. (there are a few up donated by friends). They are the part that got cut out (obviously), and they are now enjoying a view from my studio wall.

3. Here's the draft of a poster I'm working on that will become available in quantity once I get the silk screen printer up and running

4. a flower mbroidery on silk

Drawings and Graphics

I have always been a draftsperson but never a "picture a day" kinda gal. I know some people who sketch and sketch and sketch. I get whiny when my hand gets tired. Despite this I have embarked on some "shadow drawings" that keep my mind precoccupied. They are simply light studies with materials like pencil, conte crayon, and packing tape. I plan to use these techniques in a larger scale with the canvas projects. There is a scene in my bathroom that happens every morning where the light comes in the four window panes (two windows each with a upper and lower half). The shadows of the frost on the panes creates a spotted pattern on the flat window shades, oftentimes in large streaks, like mountains. As the frost melts water shadows trickle down the shades. There are two old-fashioned locks on the windows. The kind that swing back and forth. These two locks' shadows look like small men bent over, praying. They cry water droplets down the surface of the mountains. Pictures to come.

Also included are some other sketches and illustrations. The first is one of a series I did copying pictures out of "Designs On The Land", aerial landscape photographs by Alex S. MacLean. This book is beautiful and I highly recommend it for those parking-lot-farm-grid-nuclear-sunset fanatics out there. These images have really helped me in thinking about the organic parking lot structures. The second illustration is also of a similar kind of concept-pavement-although the original picture was a photgraph I took, which will soon be on view once I get my photos up here.

Organic Parking Structures

I have been working with this idea for awhile. After spending a lot of time photographing parking lots and suburban shopping plazas and office parks I began wondering if we should think more about the patterns in which we move. I wonder if driving could be not eradicated but naturalized. That's probably not the right word but what I mean by it is the process of turning something considered to be automatic and indicative of an unconscious culture into something beautiful, poetic, and closer to nature.

In parking lots nature is confined but not entirely dissolved. Small median strips of grass and planted trees color vasts fields of gray. These spaces, (Non-Sites) are not meant to be enjoyed. Do you ever see anyone picknicking on a grassy knoll outside the grocery store? Do you ever lean back and enjoy a good read on a sunny day outside Wal-Mart? If you have it might have been by accident. Shoppers rushing in and out of the parking lot in their cars may glance at you strangely from their side of the glass.

My idea is not turn the surroundings of big box retail stores into idyllic playgrounds but rather to create a structure in which we at least become more aware of the movements we make in our everyday space. This idea has recently grown in the development of text based structures. Certain words or phrases could emphasize one aspect of an environment or make us a biit more aware of the logic behind our daily routines that we take for granted. Here, the word "local" could conceivably be built in a parking lot of a retail space that is trying to increase business in a small town, where customers who care about local business might be impressed. Of course, I'll need to think of a different word to be built in the parking lot of Home Depot.

Text, shape, and environmental pleasure can combine to give more meaning to our landscapes.

The Canvases, or, My House as A Gallery

This project consists of dozens of large canvases stretched within the interior of my home creating "false walls". In it's complete phase the canvases or walls will create new rooms within the preexisting rooms. On the canvases is imagery relating to my psycho-emotional relationship to the house. Making work inside an old home all by myself (a new experience for me) I've begun to build a relationship with the space that is personal, emotional, contemplative and at times, antagonistic.

This differs greatly from previous work I've done with space relationships in that instead of locating distant spaces and trying to find some semblance of location, I am starting with a space that is imbued with location and history. Built in the 1850's our New England home has an intense personal history well documented in the town offices down the street. This is so different from the suburban concrete geometries I'm used to photographing!

Because of this intensely personal relationship I'm developing with the house space I have decided to bring that personal element to a universal level, rather than the other way around. When the house is done I will have created a space that showcases my own psychology as it relates to my home space. This psychological imagery will be open for the public to enter, peer into, investigate, and navigate through. This "ghost" space will privelege outsiders witha view into the interior.