unmakings

Wow I am sitting on the bed in the room maddie and I are sharing and listening to the washing machine churn. We will find out midweek next week if we get to sign the lease on the live workspace we’ve been after for so long—a studio in the mission area where we’ll be living and working, its super beautiful and light filled, reasonably priced and awesome. We spent today having a garage sale of some of our clothes with this great new friend named Pati, and it was nice to sit in the sun and feel productive even though we didn’t make very much money. At one point I had to use the bathroom and went to a coffee shop nearby, and there was a magic 8 ball on the counter. I shook it and asked if maddie and I would get the studio, and it said ‘try again.’ So I shook it again and asked one more time, and it said ‘I can’t answer at this time.’
It seems like mystic pleas and witchy séances should be adequate and productive actions to make sure we get this amazing new space, but its toyed with my ideas of fate. 

Part of me feels like I am more special and strange than most people in the world and therefore should get everything I ask for, that wanting something badly enough is all it takes to bring it to me. But being thrust into adulthood, into a city where I feel often when I am biking like there are transparent membranes blockading me from entering buildings, that things are harder to come by. Ask and you shall receive, it is said, but I’m learning to believe that is this is truer in a falafel place than in real estate. I hope in the next couple of days I’ll be posting news of delight and happiness, lots of exclamation points and such, but there isn’t anything concrete but hope. Somehow I feel very little anxiety. The process of signing a lease, getting a job, impressing landlords and bosses feels ridiculous and silly, like a charade where you just have to pick the right outfit and be slightly less yourself. Summer is coming, and I begin to process life’s details more like a game, as sobering and dismal as they are in reality.

That being said, I am ready to start making. I am eager to move my studio at my parents’ house to the city, my big table made out of sawhorses and a door, my dress form, my sewing machine. Its amazing how as a sculptor or material maker (I can’t be sure if writers feel this way) that the physical expanse of space represents a lack of clutter that I desire so much to feel again in my mind.

Lately I’ve been taking better advantage of being in a place with a lot of art. Last weekend I went and saw the Gertrude Stein show at SFMOMA, and on Friday I went and saw Song Dong’s installation at yerba Buena and the other Gertrude Stein show and Charlotte Salomon show at the Jewish Museum. I also saw a dress rehearsal staged reading of a play Wylie was in, and a dance performance at ODC, called ledoh in salt farm’s suicide barrier, secure in our illusion. I have a lot of notes that I took during both the Stein show and the dance performance, mostly pertaining to my own ideas for my next series. Seeing all this work made me inspired about creating my own again, even if I had moments of feeling critical. The dance performance had really amazing sets, and the costumes inspired small ideas as well.

Though I don’t know how I got there, during the performance I started thinking about hat forms as beautiful objects (my dad has a few), and I was imagining using them as heads for some of the more body-related forms. The dancers at one point all had big white daisies in their mouths and it reminded me of those surgical masks that Japanese people wear to protect them from disease or radiation, which seems like a conceptual idea to me, as they don’t really create more than a visual barrier or illusion of protection.

I went back to my idea of pantyhose sewn together, making flatter forms that through seams create drawings of things that remind you of bodies. In the performance there was a lot of projection of civic things like street cleaning and cars onto a sheer diaphanous backdrop, and I was struck with how simple and powerful a tool projection is. The simple act of projecting modernist architectural forms onto a soft clothing related surface could be a poetic little statement.

Song Dong also used projection in a moving way in his show at the Yerba Buena . He has a pretty heartfelt philosophy on a video projection of a person being analogous with their spirit, and he projected his father’s face onto his daughter’s, his own hand onto his father’s face, and people grown up onto their younger selves. His Waste Not installation was also incredibly moving, where his depression era Chinese mother saved everything, even used soap slivers and Styrofoam packaging, believing that each item incased a wisp of spirit. He laid out all of her objects in extreme order and preciousness, all around a structure that represented their small compound home.

I am writing more ideas about the new series and have been continuing to knit with the construction trail marking tape. Also have this pretty disorganized Microsoft word file that has a lot of ideas that I’m trying to cohere and play with and make a new and improved artist statement. I have a feeling that spending more time doing this will make the work for the next series more coherent as well. It feels good to write right now, and be alone with my head. Maddie and I have been living on top of each other. Its cheap but I can’t wait for space to hang pieces on walls, set up my sewing machine again, put on my smart person glasses and get down to business. If this blog post is a plea, all I ask for is space. 

{photos: 1 charlotte salomon from 'life? or theatre?' (1940-42), 2 japanese people wearing surgical maskson the street to protect from flu, 3 photo from ledoh in salt farm's suicide barrier: secure in our illusion, 4 antique hat form, 4 - 6 song dong's dad and mom, don't worry about us, we are all well}