For the next few weeks, I'm working on projections for my installation in New Orleans, a collaboration with Kira Akerman, called Amending, its for the biennial art festival called Prospect 2.

Our proposal:
Amending is an outdoor animation projected onto the facade of an old building, the former home of Promenade Fabrics in the former Garment District. Amending clothes this facade to reveal its liveliness: an intricate landscape of textile structures and tangled string. Amending is a meditation on our disposable society, and the disconnection of the process of construction from product. Amending is a collaboration by artists Silvie Deutsch and Kira Akerman. It will play on loop for the first week of Prospect 2.

Now we are envisioning sculptural elements as well as projection. The installation will be at an art space called Zeigeist. We are still deciding whether or not to project on an outdoor wall or an indoor wall.

My next 3 weeks leading up to going to New Orleans to do the installation is fairly unstructured, and I'm coming up with a system so I can insure I get a lot of work done. I am going to make a loose video experiment everyday.

More video ideas to try later:
-overlapping 2 different knitting videos
-dipping a woven piece in wax, like a network of wicks, and watching it burn/melt
-unknitting found textiles
-burning/unburning holes in a woven structure
-dripping water onto something-- paper? or some sort of disintegrating substance
-melting / unmelting shaved ice. I was thinking last night about making an animation of something slowly disintegrating as it gets wet, and then reversing the footage. what are other things that melt/disintegrate when they get wet?

-Water--some shots of water, but maybe make it abstracted from itself so you arent so sure its water.

-i want to make a tunnel / ruth asawa inspired tube unravel video. that appears to go into the wall. but i dont really know how i will do this. i wish i knew how to do computer generated animation, but i think i'm relegated to the stop motion and my housemate has a little flip video that makes low definition videos also. there are ruth asawa's pieces at de young where i was the other day. i was struck by the shadows they cast, the fact that they are static but still vibrate with the intricate repetition that went into making them. i imagine the tunnel knitting video to look a bit like one of her pieces but if you were to turn it on its size and look right into it, like a telescope. i dont know how i would make this video but i really hope i can.

Now I'm just jotting down ideas from the various emails and notebooks they have ended up in, so they can be in one place:

-organic forms
-knitting / unraveling
-relating my videos to the cellular / biological / heart. i like when there is more to what you see than what you are seeing. like there are more interpretations people could have depending on their viewpoint /background / interests.
-beauty in flaws, unraveling, breaking, wabi sabi
-highlighting / showcasing the places where things break, are asymmetrical, imperfect.
-recording peoples conversations.
- recording the river
-lace would cast amazing shadows. i think we can dictate the mood by dark lighting, video is conducive to being quiet, as are sound pieces. maybe we dont have drinks and snacks there at all? i dont want it to be a mingling art show in the traditional sense either.

-gentrification of objects, trash-to-spectacle, history of space/objects of labor
-Cusp of change: feeling of contingency. the fragility of the threads being broken, Thread, pitter patter, build up, recede.
gentrification-- something attaining more value. This reminds me of those bails of clothes sent to Africa, the losing team t-shirts for the super bowl or whatever... a sweater from barney's in a thrift store (thats the opposite of gentrification), finding something that is trash and making it spectacle-- that is the gentrification of objects.
-Blown apart / simultaneously contained world.
-we begin gathering things from the streets, from people, friends. imagine them hung from transparent wires from the ceiling, all at different intervals, giving the appearance of a rauschenberg piece or dumpster or shit-shack that has exploded into lots of little pieces. objects, material, some organic, some commercial, some whole, some broken. there is an unraveling video / water video on the brick wall, the wall looks alive, maybe this wall is a tunnel of fibers penetrating the wall, going through it. there is also a projection on the floor, textile energy, that will hit both the floor, the people in the space, their clothes, the objects that we suspend in the air. the space is only lit by the projections. the objects-- some are fabric but also just chards of wood, trash, anything we find in the 2 weeks. in my head this stuff is swaying a bit in the air, the air is thick with this blown apart world. and, some of the objects can be very specific to the area, things people would recognize? maybe we use a fan to get it really moving? or maybe the projection itself with its movement and the people in the space will create the movement.

what if there could be projection lapping at the contained detritus like water? like an ebb and flow of magic, the light comes and goes as if it were a whirring lapping shore? a world being blown apart, this is the artist's work i saw the other day that i was excited by: her name is cornelia parker, the piece i saw was called 'anti mass'. parker's work got me thinking about burnt relics of the past, and the history of a specific space. burnt fabric? still interested in playing with burning and wetting fabric.
i also saw this guy bruce conner's work.
i like his aesthetic -- that dirty, stretched, decaying, organic ...

we don't want the installation to look like wall-e's home; im not going for making our own shit shack hoarders episode, but why cant this be a set, like a fabricated environment that people interact with? i also like the idea of participation -- people engaging in the act of the unraveling they see around them. how we make them engage without disturbing the peaceful, quiet, contemplative space?

Just discovered this guy Josh Blackwell.
interesting use of found trash / textile techniques / carelessness with carefulness
- bed sheet windows on the wall being burned/ unburned. or what about real windows? I think using imagery of domesticity is appropriate for this project...
-there is the sound of water, the river, maybe overlayed with found recordings we could make of people in the city as we collect things. violin strings? Environment / sense engage / experience: idea-to-visual image. water sounds. These sounds could be mixed with something else. I keep thinking about violins, possibly just the stringy-ness of them. We could do some found sound recording of the Mississippi river, maybe even people talking on the street. something about recording sound making it possible to freeze/preserve a moment in time and space is really relevant to whats going on here.
-I like the idea of 2 projections, one on the ground/peoples' bodies/clothing, and one on the brick wall. the 2 videos can be in dialogue with each other. we should just fantasize about this environment and then figure out the technical details of how to make it happen, and then we can scale back if necessary. reflection in mirror, found chards, reflection in water? projecting onto people/ clothes. intimacy with textiles, memory of space, history of labor.

- How can we integrate the whole community? It is definitely out of a white box, and maybe if this event were more everyone friendly, less obtuse and art-speaky; non-academic, definitely. how can we make this experience more interactive? i immediately thought of felix gonzalez torres, that guy who put a big pile of candy in a corner and asks you to take from it, or, this flaming lips show i went to once where they had little kids dressed up in animal costumes handing out fudgsicles to the crowd. something about being able to take something small and sweet and free makes things more accessible. and hey, maybe taste could be a sense we activate as well? or we advertise something about the show in our flyer that makes all kinds of people eager to come? a clothing swap? some sort of raffle? sending out kid/everyone friendly invites. bring an object to place in an alter... would people do it? maybe if they got something in exchange... i am imagining a corner of the room as a cascade of forgotten objects like stuffed animals and stuff, kind of piled like felix gonzalez torres candy pile, and there is projection on it of the knitting... kids rolling around in it....

- commercial patterns, im still obsessed.. i do think of them as a map, a map of the body, a map of the labor/directions that go into clothing... you can see why i spent a year just focusing on them. one issue with them is the are so fragile, they need to be backed with something (i used sheer fabric and glue to stiffen them in my thesis.)
-- definitely need to project onto brick wall, so special, but also project onto another surface as well?
-- how high is the ceiling? strings / ropes hanging?
- lights / flickering / candles... projection need darkness, projection creates its own strange light
WATER-have you ever noticed how rarely water looks like water? (abstracted water shots, that maybe dont look like water at first.)

-white water (like in a river, rushing, that could be interesting looking)
-how water sometimes obscures whats in it, like maybe we submerge little objects or things under a little water and that makes it hard to figure out what they are. i like the reveal/conceal thing both in the textile unraveling/raveling and in water submerge/emerge
-both textiles and water have delicate texture, ephemeral structure
-rivers and seams -- converging, attaching, dividing, ripping,
-never seeing the same water twice (in the case of a river, you dont move your eyes yet the water is constantly changing in one spot)

{photos/videos: my own video experiment; ruth asawa's wire sculptures at the de young, cornelia parker's anti mass (2005); bruce connor's snore (1960); one of josh blackwell's plastic baskets; felix gonzales torres' portrait of ross (1991); roni horn's still water (the river thames, for example) - image c (1999)}

i feel kinda bad that my blog posts are beginning to be diary entries mixed with art desires that arent materializing-- sorry to anyone who reads these more recent posts for the lack of content and artistic fervor. i'm so frusterated with my life right now mainly because i'm not making any art, and don't feel the impulse to make that i had a few months ago. i am totally bored at work and spend most of my off time looking at/stressing about apartments, and preparing for the next working week. i don't want this to continue. i'm thinking of quitting my job and leaving the city. looking for more residency opportunities, working in my parents garage again. i know it would be kind of a regression in the eyes of some cubicle worshipping bar hopping shopper, but in terms of artmaking i think it might be a step forward. i am pretty unhappy how things are going right now.

this weekend i have to go back to santa cruz to house sit yet again. i'm really looking forward to catching my mom before she goes out of town and talking through all these feelings ive been having. im also excited to work on the quilt/map piece that i was writing about a few posts back: 

Wall piece: Maps are sewn into the places on an old quilt where it is coming apart. Brown (hose colored) sheer tulle is layered over about half of the surface, seamed in parts. There are parts where housing insulation is coming out, and parts where plaster is caked on. Panti hose coming off of the bottom, crusted and sad.

i have this old quilt that i got in olympia washington when zoe and i were on tour there perhaps even before i started college, maybe it was after. i got it at this weird big vintage flea market/warehouse thing, and ive slept with it and brought it out on foss hill and ran it through the wash so many times that it looks like it really has been in my family for centuries. there are places where the batting is coming out through holes, it reminds me of housing insulation. at one point last year i tried mending the holes with old clothes i had that were kind of special... never finished doing that but anyway the whole thing feels like a big time map, and i wanted to fill in the holes in places with paper maps, and just kind of keep building onto it with allusions to the body and to landscape and architecture and just get really rauschenbergian with it. i'm interested in the way that with time, and with use, material things (especially cloth) gets broken down and decayed and vulnerable. there is this materiality to things in the world that seems to slowly become fragile and threadbare, yet edit and build, change, as time moves on, as if objects, materials and environments have their own volition. there is also the sentimental connotations of a quilt-- a tradition of using old but memory filled clothing scraps to piece together something that holds you, comforts you, in sleep. in this way, a quilt itself is like a large map of memorys. also: i keep going back to wanting to disclose but simultaneously make foreign the process of making clothes, to highlight our increasing lack of intimacy with our material environment, due to globalized labor and specialized professions.


then, to relate these systematic and age old processes involved in clothing making to the systems that describe the larger landscape-- mapping, building, receding and changing of landscape as time runs its course. i want to make work that speaks to feeling like a tiny speck on the earth but also closely and monumentally acquaints me with the intimacy of objects. like how small you feel, when you are in an airplane and look down sometimes the ground from above looks quiltlike. and when you are in your bed, you can look down at a mini domain of which you are the ruler. and the seams that metaphorically mend fields are roads--arterial, winding, carved out by use.

In just writing this blog post i typed 'map quilt' into google images and i found a textile artist named leah evans who makes quilts after fantasy mappings of land. this is her artists' statement from her site:

"It is the use of maps in organizing our ideas of land that interests me most of all. Often people ask me for specifics about the places and symbols in my work. Most of my pieces are not consciously based on specific places. For me they are intimate explorations of map language and imagined landscapes. Through my research and experience I have decided that maps create more questions than they answer."

{photos: 1 & 2 gee's bend quilts from design squish, 3 rauschenberg's bed (1955) from the new york times , 4 google image search for 'farmland aerial perspective' yeilded this pretty baby, 5 leah evans' from dwell.com }

I got a library card and have been trying to read before bed to quell my cold self (fighting at times with my impulse to watch a law and order internet episode). I just read Gertrude Stein’s Writings 1932 – 1946, a nice intellectual ramble after the over the top sexy apocalyptic sci fi of Gary shteyngart’s super sad true love story. There is one passage that I need to transcribe here before I return the book to the library:

‘one must not forget that the earth seen from an airplane is more splendid than the earth seen from an automobile. The automobile is the end of progress on the earth, it goes quicker but essentially the landscapes seen from an automobile are the same as the landscapes seen from a carriage, a train, a wagon, or in walking. But the earth seen from an airplane is something else. So the 20^th century is not the same as the 19^th century and it is very interesting knowing that Picasso has never seen the earth from an airplane that being of the 20^th century he inevitably knew that the earth is not the same as the 19^th century, he knew it, he made it, inevitably he made it different, and what he made is a thing that now all the world can see. When I was in America, I for the first time traveled pretty much all the time in an airplane and when I looked at the earth, I saw all the lines of cubism made at a time when not any painter had ever gone up in an airplane. I saw there, on the earth, the mingling lines of Picasso, coming and going, developing and destroying themselves…I knew that a creator is contemporary and as the 20^th century is a century which sees the earth as no one has ever seen it, the earth has a splendor that it has never had, and as everything destroys itself in the 20^th century and nothing continues, so then the 20^th century has a splendor which is its own and Picasso is of this century, he has that strange quality of an earth that one has never seen and of things destroyed as they have never been destroyed.’ (Gertrude Stein, p. 532 – 533)

so I’ve been getting apocalyptic vibes lately, from everything. i loved so much how gertrude writes of artists’ existing and responding to their time and also the unknown that is the future, and how even though Picasso never saw the earth from high above, his work almost predicted the way it might look. And I also loved her comparison of the way the ground looks from an airplane to drawing. It reminded me of this very stupid critique I had with dennis oppenheim when he came to Wesleyan. I guess I say it was very stupid because he seemed so listless and dispassionate when he spoke about his own work, discouraging to me that the art world could take someone who’s early work was very ‘70s earth-worky conceptual, and churn them out into someone so clearly apathetic about art. But anyway, during his crit with me (about my abstract commercial pattern unmakings), all he really said was that my work reminded him of the topographical quilt that is the earth seen from the window of an airplane. And like the seams running through my pieces, roads bisect farms, lines mingle and ‘[come and go, develop and destroy themselves…]’ (stein).

it was also stein’s hinting at the fact that different eras destroy the ones that came before them, that really struck me, I guess I’ve thought about that before but never dared admit it. Just with all the contingency I think everyone feels right now but may not always acknowledge, I want to grasp this thing that is so remarkable to me, that things get destroyed, and leave a trace, and there’s just this push and pull as time passes. and for me, I derive comfort from inventing and engaging in processes of making and knowing and gathering, comfort in clothing, clothing that is a cocoon that could work to protect me from the harshness of the world. I think this is something I’m trying to get at for my portland show (I’m doing a show next month at Appendix project space), finding this place where time, everyday ritual, and interaction with materials can be in dialogue with what goes on outside my studio, where things are confusing and there is hardship and destroying and rebuilding, constantly. There is fragility and beauty, but there is also utility, convertibility, mappings, systems, some sort of master plan.

{photos, from top to bottom: glynis chaffin-tinglof's native, google image search for 'aerial view from airplane window', my own unmakings, and a photo swiped from this blog.}