new seam drawings

im back------I’ve been feeling a little displaced and am trying to figure out how to spend my alone time. Ive been creative in strange and sort of playful spurts. Last night I tried to do a cover of a dolly parton song and it turned out awful and super weird. Tonight I played dress up and prettied myself for a weeping self portrait drawing impulse that now seems silly to act upon. Meanwhile, Here is a new seam drawing and then some actual drawings of seam drawings. I used charcoal, gouache and water. They are on brown paper that was used to wrap blue-prints at my work. I’ve been dwelling on the idea of drawing something material that you made, something that could be important on its own. Is it an excersize to get to know an object I made better? its been nice to get dirty charcoal hands again after like, 3 years or so away from the second dimention.

this weekend I want to do some drawing foreplay with alex—im going to be house sitting for my parents. Blind portraits? Something about drawing someones face is so intimate. Is that what im doing with these seam drawing drawings?

i'm currently looking for another place to live. now im thinking, like, some sort of place where i have a room for sleeping and another room that is a studio, and hopefully its all not too too expensive to ask for. after looking at all these studio spaces in the city-- its more clear how impossible it is to find a large industrial private space with an arts community that is affordable. everything that is in that vein is in bayview (too far to get too on a regular basis) or is a tiny cell in more convenient locations.

since im at a computer all day at work i get really wrapped up in looking at craigslist and a lot of my art ideas have to do with craigslist. i love art projects that use it as a tool to structure imput-- claires thesis where she made people who responded to her ad dinner in exchange for filming them tell stories. this woman sophie blackall's missed connection illustrations. i keep wondering if the people talked about in the san francisco missed connections are me-- i feel so connected to male bikers on market street in the morning, the men buying yogurt at the corner store, and i find myself reading missed connections and wondering if im the redhead on the bicycle even though my hair is brown or if im the curvy woman in black jeans at the gym even though im not very curvy and never go to the gym. i dont even own black jeans. my new idea is that i want to recreate the posts in photographs but with me in every situation. eyla and i were talking about collaborating on some sort of project-- maybe this would be a good thing to do with her cuz she makes really great photographs . (this is her blog, below is one of her pieces).

i want to revise my artists' statement. feeling like its not completely relavent anymore/trynign to be a little too much like anne wilson. i think i need to write more about the work i made this summer and the work i made in portland and merge that with the writing i did for my thesis. the obvious connection between them is clothes, but i feel like there is more going on that im not totally able to pinpoint which i think was why i had such a hard time in portland, especially when the boys kept urging me to talk about it all and i dont know if i was able and i was frusterated that none of them were reading my blog.

things i want to do this weekend while in santa cruz:

1- baking cookies
2-beach
3-go swimming
4-draw portrait of alex (blind?)
5-go to the bargain barn
6-eat bagels
7-laundry
8-bring back thread
9-fix leather jacket
10-look at residencies online
11-write kristin a letter

{photos: 1-6 my own seam drawing drawings, 7 sophie blackall's missed connections, 8 eyla cuenca's x-files version of felix gonzalez-torres' posters, 9 the santa cruz coast from wikipedia}

Not to brag, but today was spent sitting in the sun in my garden in my bikini, drinking tangerine juice and drawing. In the absence of having a studio I've been drawing and planning things I want to make. this is the thing i'm most excited about so far:

Addressing a body of sculptural work like a fashion collection. Making like 50 ‘looks’ but questionable as to their function, not necessarily wearable clothes, but conceived as members of a closet. These looks have multiple thematic ideas running through them. Possible themes to be present running through the 'collection':

a. Sheerness (over or under materials), panty hose, beige, like skin, printed commercial patterns (from fwm) onto sheer fabric

{comme des garcons fw 09 from this blog, ernesto neto's while nothing happens 2008}

b. Maps and commercial patterns – paper

{my own pattern combine 2010, map (unknown source)}

c. Housing insulation, stuffed panty hose, suiting innards

{housing insulation, suit innards from fun article in the new york times fashion mag about suits}

d. Drawings indicating planning (or drawing textile design, ie polka dots), on maps, commercial patterns, fabrics—some printed at fwm

{leonardo da vinci studies of embryos circa like 1503, kiki smith lying with the wolf 2001}

e. Crusted over with glue, plaster, materials:

{plaster mask from style rookie's flikr, crusty old bodies from pompeii relics 'ghosts of vesuvius'}

f. Construction (ie. Mason line, florescent orange, traffic cones, treated as fabric/sewn/knit)

{construction site photo from a website curiously called 'erections,' christo and jeanne claude wrapped coast 1968-69}

g. Polka dots

{comme des garcons ss'10, light dots by julie lansom}

h. Old quilts

{gee's bend quilt (see more great ones here, bedroom by james merrell}

Ideas for 'Looks':

· Floor Piece: Sheer camping tent out of sewn flesh/hose colored tule, with tent poles. Panti hose coming off of it in places

· Voluminous sheer coat of same hose color, with housing insulation/suiting innards/interfacing in the front front/lapel, layer of construction nylon mason tape wrapping around that but beneath the tulle. pantihose for sleeves and skirt (sewn together in strips). Sheer tulle bloomers, crusted over with plaster.

· Long map/commercial pattern jacket and wide leg pants crusty with plaster, that buttons asymmetrically with nuts and bolts hardware. With small little sleeves. With commercial pattern front and big pattern pockets, Commercial pattern collar, insulation/interfacing/padding on collar. Drawings indicating planning (or drawing textile design, ie polka dots), on maps & commercial patterns surface. Worn with hose.

· Flat, cut out but unsewn commercial pattern tent jacket, sewed in place onto map. Tent-like structure but with pattern collar and nut and bolt buttons down the front. Little map pants. All crusty with plaster.

· Coat made out knitted fluorescent trail marking tape with pieces dangling. Buttons asymmetrically with nuts and bolts buttons. Half of the front is a commercial pattern jacket front. Pattern full collar and pockets, interfacing and padding. plaster crusted. Tied with little horse trail marking line.

· Coatlike Dress with snow fencing poof skirt and hood, traffic cones?, and bodice, sleeves, and collar made out of pieces of maps and commercial patterns. One side of the commercial pattern coat is longer than the other. Crusty with plaster. Worn with crusty polka dot leggings.

· Little tiny map/pattern jacket with collar and epaulets and nuts and bolts buttons. Big full skirt out of snow fencing and traffic cones. Little construction material leggings (snow fencing or knitting marking tape). All crusty with plaster. Little trail marking tape bow around collar.

· Façade of pattern front on top of snowfencing and traffic cone structure. Little crusty commercial pattern pants with polka dots drawn on them in charcoal.

· Long dress made out of maps and commercial patterns with pockets, collar, nuts/bolts buttons, with a long sheer hose colored dress over it. Housing insulation/padding is sewn between the layers. A pattern skirt protrudes from the front like an absess. Housing insulation and stuffed panti hose trail out of the bottom. Crusty with plaster.

· 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.

· Polka dot pattern coat (half overlayed onto polka dot fabric, half polka dots draw directly onto the paper, pattern pants with polka dots drawn on. A little trail marking tape belt tied through pattern belt loops. Hose.

· padded/wire/interfaced polka dot shirt façade with commercial pattern pockets and collar sewn onto Knitted nylon caution tape/snow fence skirt shape. All crusty with crusty nylon hose coming off of the bottom.

· Totem: 2 old quilts collaged together overlapping over housing insulation, and tulle/hose tube structure wrapped in one or two loops of fluorescent trail marking tape, tied dangling. Housing insulation comes out the bottom. Not crusty.

· Long flat map coat with places that are mostly flat, boxy, not sewn (like a kimono). Commercial pattern collar. Sleeves and front sides made out of quilt. Worn with hose. Crusty.

· housing insulation stuffed inside a nude tulle coat dress form (one sleeve is long, one is short). Tulle is overlayed over shoulder pads (polka dot patterned?) and commercial pattern lapel and collar. With nut bolt buttons, big industrial zipper down the side wear a heart would be. A little unzipped and housing insulation is coming out of the opening. Housing insulation and nylon coming out of the bottom. Excess tulle comes off of the form in places like a trail. Crusty.

i have been blogging less because i have been making very little in terms of art work in the past few weeks as i settle into my new job (landscape architecture studio admin assistant/ graphic designer/web person) and new house, decorating and making artistic choices more on the domestic level (putting up stuff i find on the walls and replanting little succulents into mini terra cotta pots, drinking beer in my garden and reordering my closet. lately mostly what i've been doing at work (like i wrote in the last post) is digitizing and organizing images for the image library they have here-- some are mundane pictures of benches and lamp posts but often i come across interesting sculptures, walls or earthworky unusual treatments of land. i think this job is rekindling my interest in mapping also-- the architects here all use aerial perspective for their drawings and have pretty intense schematic and symbolic systems for representing different elements of landscape. reminds me that as much as i have read and waxed on and on about globalized labor and the loss of the handmade these past few years, its really the mapping, systematic and imformational aspect of clothing patterns that really drew me to them. they map the body in this weird totally unemotional way. i want to do more stuff that relates to clothing with blue prints and landmaps-- in portland i got kinda into going to home depot as sort of a project runway type exercise -- like running around with a cart looking for things that are ment for landscape/architectural construction and reinvisioning them in processes that are clothing related. like knitting construction mason line. i have this silly yearning to make a garment out of traffic cones. i am actively looking for a studio for this year. tomorrow i am looking at one in the dogpatch. i know i tend to be pretty hard on myself but not making much after having so much momentum for the past 6 months, the residency hopping and constant studio dilegence--- now i feel like most of my time is spent imagining myself as an artist but not really actively being one. oh well, it'll happen soon! also, after talking with ben more about the show in his space that he runs with anohter person here in san fran, it seems like they have too much going on and dont know whether or not they want to continue using their space as a gallery. so its still pretty up in the air/ unlikely i will have a show there. i was sort of releaved (weirdly), and i think its because i realized in portland how different working towards the idea of a show and my studio practice is, and i feel like i really have to address what is more important to me. my thesis was largely an installational idea that used material studies in the studio to become a grand experience, and then portland had a similar rhythm in my mind. it seems like the knowledge that people will come experience the work, thinking of them walking through a space, makes me feel that a show has to be installational or environmental for it to be powerful, which i know isnt true but i think at least right now, is the most exciting type of work that i respond to in shows. but, as an artist i think i enjoy a studio practice that is more material and labor intensive, hands on, exploring processes and inflicting different actions on objects in a systemized whimlike way. so these two things seem in conflict and maybe i'd just like to focus on the latter right now. and also, once i get a studio i can always invite people over to see the work, i'm not too worried about it. anyway i should get back to work... attached are some images i liked from the image bank that i found recently.

...and just so i don't forget:

-i find this women's apartment inspiring for domestic purposes: http://freundevonfreunden.com/jenna-brinning/?sessionId=s3dlbvo84lu4sd6f88ang0hot4

-someone emailed me this link for this show in philly of fibers/found objects artist sheila hicks' work http://www.icaphila.org/exhibitions/hicks.php and i love the images included in the online write-up. i'm including the images here.

This blog post is me ellaborating on the previous post-- my current inspirations. I am trying to understand WHY i am into the things i'm into, and i have a feeling it goes beyond prettiness.

the polka dots-- compulsive, obsessive, just like my interest in obsessive hoarding and also obsessive organizing.

I was talking to eyla last night about why making a drawing of a material seam drawing would be useful, because i keep thinking about it. She said that the act of drawing something better informs the drawer of the object being drawn, especially if the drawer made the object to begin with. Also there is the possibility of inventing things that arent there, both materially and also in terms of the drawers' personal attachment to the thing. it reminded me of my desire to invent stories that didn't actually happen to an object, like in the case of the bargain barn. all the imagined histories, and possibilities of unknown experience. Today i was thinking about how the seam drawings can take so many iterations, depending on how i decide to hang them-- it sort of reminds me of james welling and his photos of aluminum foil. he sees the foil as a 'machine to manufacture randomness' -- an analogy for language in the way that it uses the same words over and over but is constantly reconfigured. I feel like my interest in the hoarders and simultaneous obsession with organized closets mirrors my ideas about my own artistic practice-- when am i artistically free and when am i following a system of rules? my thesis was the collision of followed and missfollowed, making and unmaking. my actual practice of making art is similar-- whim and system.

{photo: james welling, photo of aluminum foil}

- my current inspirations for march-

polka dots, seams, and 3 D drawing

compulsive hoarding / stacking of trash & junk (on the ground)

closets and clothes hangers

{photo credits: 1 & 2 comme des garcons ss'10 rtw, 3 my own seam drawing, 4 sartorialist, 5 & 6 comme des garcons fw'09, 7 patrik ervell ss'11, 8 anselm kiefer's 20 Jahre Einsamkeit (twenty years of solitude) 1998, 9 hoarders on a&e graphic, 10 song dong's waste not, 11 assorted hangers, 12 closet (unknown sources)}

im already having a GREAT TIME in san Francisco. I am looking for an apartment and studio this week so I can get back into making. I want to keep up the same momentum I had this winter and in Portland—I have a feeling this is going to be great. i am goign to ahve a studio here in san francisco, I have a job and I will just spend all my time working and making. Last night I went to a video show at the ATA (artists’ television access) – there was a series of videos shown by different artists, all combining video with sound (some live and some recorded.) Anyways, highlights of the show: this one girl lana (I lost my program and can’t remember her full name) made this piece where she layered video tapes with an old vcr mixer and played electronic music over it. Such cool images/sounds resulted. There was some other really beautiful footage of space from semiconductor films (here is the video).

These videos got me really inspired about adding sound to my films, and combining footage in a more ‘material’ way like I do in my sculpture. like how in my plaster pieces, each piece goes through a laundry list of processes before it is done—cut, sewn, inked, epoxied, plastered, wet down, painted, dirtied. I was thinking about how I could combine different existing footage with my knit videos and how sound could be a part of it. also-- video could be a good outlet for me while I don’t have a studio or place to live, as it is all contained in my computer.

This weekend I am going to go back to santa cruz and work on more seam drawings because I have some potential buyers! I’m excited to go through them and really address what are the best ones. I also really want to do some more traditional drawings (in charcoal) of some of them, like the polka dot one. Ive been feeling the need to make some drawings after having dinner with Christine Bourdette in Portland. I was inspired by her sculpture but also by the fact that she also makes very beautiful drawings and seems to be quite fluid between mediums. I'd say right now she is one of my biggest inspirations at the moment. That’s all for now.

{photos: 1 & 2 are my own works in process cocoons and seams (2011), 3 is christine bourdette's mistaken identity (2006}