don’t breathe a word

I am not sure exactly why I have been silent here this fall; it could be that I am overwhelmed with the amount of work that I need to do, both for AIB and with my return to my full time teaching position at SCC. I am sure that I do not know how to begin to say what needs to be said. It is quite probable that as the days grow nearer to graduation the perfectionist in me is winning, that in search for the right answer, the best work, the correct opinion of what my thesis needs to say I have no words. Like there is a correct opinion . . .

I can say that I am ruminating; my thoughts not clear on my new processes. I work in fits and spits of inspiration and before being distracted by my responsibilities, all the while thoughts my editor in my head says, it’s not perfect, you are not disciplined enough in your art making. This is not new to me; unless I am playing this has always been my process. There is always the moment for me as I am working on something new that reminds me of “the deep breath before the plunge,” diving into the deep end of the pool and not knowing how to swim. Sometimes I just want to know where the joy went. I don’t feel this when I play, but it is in the approach that changes everything for me. When did making art and writing become a job on my endless list of things to do that never gets crossed out.

Amongst a number of pieces I am working on I am playing with a chair that I have stripped of all but its skeleton, looking for its foundation, later I hope to make the chair deceptively comfortable, letting others view its hidden dangers. In times of chaos and insecurity I need to find structure.

the end is where we start from

It is an odd place to be at the beginning of the end, the last term, of a journey for me that has taken nearly a decade. Yet there is much to do and accomplish this term. I am surprisingly calm even in the face of an overwhelming amount needing to get done.

My thesis paper needs to be researched and written because I have changed my materials and the presentation of my work. This was necessary. I could have chosen an easier route, stayed with photography as the most appropriate medium for the expression of this body of work. But I found that by using objects and manipulating them I am able to express fully what I need to say. I will to continue to explore and create additional pieces in order to come to my final exhibition installation.

It is a good place to be.

bookshelf :: spring 09

For archival purposes I am publishing my reading list for spring 09. If you are curious about any of these books I have most of them and could give you feedback before you decide to check them out or make purchases.

• Philip Armstrong :: As Painting: Division and Displacement
• Sylvan Barnet :: A Short Guide to Writing about Art
• Terry Barrett :: Criticizing Photographs, An Introduction to Understanding Images
• Bill Beckley :: Uncontrollable Beauty: Toward a New Aesthetics
• Nicolas Bourriaud :: Postproduction
• David Campany:: Art and Photography
• Rainer Crone :: Louise Bourgeois The Secret of the Cells
• Keith Davis, Susan Krane, Britt Salvesen, and Claire Carter :: At the Crossroads of American Photography: Callahan, Siskind, Sommer
• Catherine M. DeZegher :: Inside the Visible an elliptical traverse of the 20th century art, in, of, and from the feminine
• Larry Fink :: Social Graces
• Hal Foster :: The Return of the Real
• Tierney Gearon :: Daddy where are you?
• Elizabeth Grosz :: Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminine
• Kay Redfield Jamison :: Touched with Fire Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament
• Donald Kuspit :: The End of Art
• Anne Lamott :: Bird by Bird Some Instructions on Writing and Life
• Lucy Lippard :: Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory
• Francis Morris :: Louise Bourgeois
• Mignon Nixon :: Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art
• Gerhard Richter :: Atlas
• Kimberlee Roth :: Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds and Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem
• Susan Sontag :: Regarding the Pain of Others
• Botho Strau :: Gerhard Richter: Overpainted Photographs
• SarahThornton :: Seven Days in the Art World
• Glenn Ward :: Teach Yourself Postmodernism
• Tracey Warr :: The Artist's Body
• Art in America
• Artforum
• Aperture

museum :: gallery :: spring 09

For archival purposes I am publishing the museums and galleries that I visited during the spring 09 term.

• SMoCA :: Emmet Gowin :: Photography Symposium
• Phoenix, AZ :: Janet Echelman :: Her Secret is Patience
• Center for Creative Photography :: The Photographs of Linda Connor :: Odyssey
• The Gallery @ the Library :: Scottsdale Civic Center Library :: Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reefs :: The Institute for Figuring and Companions
• Bentley Gallery :: Ulrike Arnold :: Stone and Stardust
• Bentley Gallery :: Ellen Wagener :: Not Quite Paradise
• Gebert Contemporary :: John Randall Nelson :: Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture
• Lisa Sette Gallery :: Alan Bur Johnson :: Swarm
• SMoCA :: At the Crossroads of American Photography: Callahan, Siskind, Sommer
• @Central Gallery :: Lasting Light 125 Years of Grand Canyon Photogrpahy
• Lisa Sette Gallery :: Angela Ellsworth :: Underpinnings
• Nielsen Gallery :: Sedrick Huckaby :: Paintings & Drawings
• Judi Rotenberg Gallery :: Zack Storm :: Post - Post & The Apocalypse Somewhere
• Judi Rotenberg Gallery :: Douglas Weathersby :: ES Inaugural Retrospective and Storage Loft
• The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston :: Rachel Whiteread
• The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston :: Photographic Figures

artists :: spring 09

For archival purposes I am posting the artists I looked at the spring 09.

• Louise Bourgeois
• Paul Chan
• Angella Ellsworth
• Larry Fink
• Tierney Gearon
• Cai Guo-Qiang
• Maria Adelaida Lopez
• Anna Mendieta
• Janice Redman
• Francesca Woodman

completion without end

Sharing a quote I found in a book called As Painting: Division and Displacement by Philip Armstrong, Laura Lisbon, and Stephen Melville. These words again reference to this idea of the completion and the continuance of the creation of art.

"But this completion without end—or rather, this finite finishing, if one attempts to understand thereby a completion that limits itself to what is, but that, to achieve that very thing, opens the possibility of another completion, and that is therefore also infinite finishing—this paradoxical mode of per-fection is doubtless what our whole tradition demands one to think and avoids thinking at the same time."
—Jean-Luc Nancy

As I focus on bringing together all the various form of my art into one cohesive body I look to other artists who work in various forms and mediums at once, each practice informing the body of work as a whole.

never finished

It is as the term comes to its resolution with final paperwork due and a body of work to complete, that my anticipation of what I wanted to accomplish become a long term laundry list of things to do. It feels like something I read on a blog called accidental creative by Todd Henry.

“It will never be good enough. It will never cease, and there will always be more to do . . . Because the work of art is never finished. As long as there are patterns to form, as long as there is meaning to discern, as long as there are realities to reveal, the mind will continue trying to do what it does. . . I am an unfinished sentence. But if we approach our days with possibility and hope we can see not all that is left undone, but all that is left to do. . . We need to see what is unfinished as a gift to be unpacked rather than a burden to be born.” Todd Henry http://accidentalcreative.com/blog/2009/03/16/never-finished/

As a perfectionist and as a goal-oriented person these words resonate with me. For the past decade I have become aware of my need to see my art and my life as an ever-evolving process. Nothing in my life is finished, completed, or fixed. My past, present, and future are all one continuum, just as my photographs speak to and inform my objects, as one body of work supports another.

So I refocus on being in the creative process and move forward.

During the past month I have worked on and hopefully completed all my research papers, met with my mentor Marie Navarre, had final critiques, and put up a show of some of my new body of work bind. This term I have evolved from taking images of my family members, to creating three-dimensional art to express my childhood memories. While working I have found these new materials and the process of creating these objects more time consuming than I had anticipated. Despite my goal oriented expectations and desire to have more accomplished I will continue to add build this body of work until our June residency.

words and reflections

I needed to examine the silenced experiences of my childhood. Ignored and forgotten, years of my life had been swept away, never to be acknowledged. These memories, like crumbs that were swept into the floorboards, crumbs eventually covered by rugs; the rugs became stories of replacement. My memories were traded for the pretense of perfection in order to create the flawless family snapshot.

My need to express these invisible behaviors and how I felt as a child took various forms. I obsessively wrapped objects, examined the scars and the holes this left in my life, and I opened my eyes to the disintegration of my family. Looking back at my perceived role as the person needed to hold the broken pieces together, driven to protect our family from all judgment that might potentially poke a hole into our ideal image.

I intuitively gathered objects that I was drawn to and then I contemplated their role in my childhood and family dysfunction. I then began to recreate some of the compulsive behaviors by binding these pieces until they no longer had a useful function.

I took my emotional scars and began to make them visible by wrapping my own body and creating temporary scars. I experimented to give my body the holes and missing pieces that I have discovered in my life.

With my anger, I conveyed the deterioration of my childhood by going back to some of the painful events that felt so much to me like empty shells and destroyed them; only futilely attempt to piece them together again.

I needed to give form to the years of my past that had no voice. The stories that were confined within the walls of our house needed break free and be expressed. When we have pieces missing in our histories, when we are lacking the integrity and structure of our immediate family, the holes that are left are gaping wounds; we watch the missing pieces become invisible disintegrating into dust.

industrial reef

Yesterday at the Scottsdale Civic Center Library I went to the opening of the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reefs by The Institute For Figuring and Companions. The Institute For Figuring, directed by Christine and Margaret Wertheim, is dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science, mathematics and the technical arts. It was amazing to see the community come together to create such a beautiful public art project. This exhibit will be up until July 11, 2009 for anyone who wants to see this recycled reef.

Welcoming you into the library is the recycled art of the industrial sea by Joe Willie Smith. I have been documenting process and it has been extraordinary to see 200 pounds of recycled industrial strapping turn into gigantic jellyfish floating in the air!

yin yang

It seems like so much needs to be created in order to uncover art that speaks in our voice. When visiting SMoCA we went on a gallery talk by Claire Carter. While viewing the exhibit At the Crossroads of American Photography: Callahan, Siskind, Sommer, I was grateful to hear that Callahan had over 300,000 negatives as part of his estate when he passed away. Creating art is hard work, it is dedication and it takes many failures to get to the image that sings. Even for someone as brilliant as Harry Callahan. When re-reading a portion of Art and Fear by David Bayless I am again reminded “ the function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars. One of the basic and difficult lessons that every artist must learn is the even the failed pieces are essential.”

After a number of critiques of my most recent work, I have become aware of all the voices in my head the self editors that whisper even before the work leaves its perfection in my mind and fly out there to be born in my imperfect hands. I hear so many voices mumble softly, they will think you are angry or that you are crazy. Who are “they” and who cares . . . I care as I hear the voices of guilt and protection, protection for my mother and judgment that could break her, protection of my father’s absence, and my silence in dealing with my first eight years of life, as if my memories didn’t exist. The hiding of these times trained me to search for the dark reality I needed to face. I am the yin to my family’s yang. I need to be free to express my memories so these secrets are no more, yet this secret is the tie that binds, the invisible string that makes me responsible for keeping up the pretence set in motion decades ago. I will continue to push my missing me images exploring all the things I missed, the secrets unspoken, speak.

I remember the book Are You My Mother? As a child I loved this book and related to this little bird who wondered where his mother was. I wondered what it really meant to have a mother, what was it like to bond with the one gave birth to you, what was it like to be cared for and nurtured by your mother. I was missing something, as foundational as who is my mother? As a child I was always uncertain how to deal with these labels because the roles family members took on were not the names I called them. When it came to men our family they were more invisible than my childhood.

Even here in this moment of writing this the thoughts in my head urge me to balance this with my acceptance of my life and I choose it, to write of all the positive aspects that I have acquired because of the challenges I faced and to tell you my mother did the best she could do. I know this and recognize that she has grown and become the best person she can be.

Meanwhile, our show during Art Detour 21 at Jackson Street Studios was a tremendous amount of work but well worth it. It was great to interact with people coming in and looking at my work, some with questions, others with observations. There was a continuous flow of traffic all weekend that was noticeably busier on Friday night. At the same time I had two pieces chosen by Melanie and Michelle of Tilt Gallery up in their Back Room. It is a lovely little space where people congregate around great appetizers and wine. During conversations I often look up and around me at their room size cabinets of curiosity. I was honored to have Grammie at Ninety and Natalie at Six in this space. That Saturday the kids from Faith North Montessori School’s Story Art Program put out handmade books, matted photographs, and both watercolor and photo blank cards in the Downtown Phoenix Markets. They had a great time sharing their work and talking with customers about the art they created this term.

On a lighter note Christopher reminded to play . . . even though I continue to re-learn to do this. So I will play and push and make a mess of it all breaking down the pretence of perfection and create the falling apart and putting together the pieces of my life just as I needed to do as a child.