{christo and jean claude wrapped trees (1997-98)}

so i now have a studio. its all set up and there are now no excuses for lack of productivity.
i ahve to make up some good homework assignments for myself these days. to ensure productivity heading in the right direction this summer. i'm feeling a little disorganized -- but i really want to go through all my images and pick out the successful pieces, go through my writing, organize my materials, so that i can figure out how to begin. i started working on that quilt piece, and also compiled all the garments i have made with clothing patterns, but i'm still feeling paralyzed in terms of actually making things happen. maybe going through old images would help?
i really want to get an sf library card.
yesterday for 4th of july i went to bolinas and on the drive there maddie and i passed by a field of wrapped hay bails that we photographed extensively-- as it looked so much like an installation. it reminded me of christo's wrapped trees whicha re so evocative-- also reminded me how much plastic can take the place of fabric. i think about clothing as a barrier between intimate human and elemental world-- using plastic as a substitution here adds a notion of suffocating nature that is pretty important. also when things are wrapped you can't see whats inside, you have to imagine. reminds me too, that hiding and revealing have to do etymologically with the word apocalypse, from calypso, the one who hides oddysius in the oddysey. When clothing is incased in a plastic drycleaner bag, you know it is clean, preserved, hanging there pressed and special. When clothing is in a plastic shopping bag, depending on the brand insignia on the bag, the clothing seems to have more value, or at least be new.


also coming across a lot of good material on urban planning and design at work-- good aerial photos, maps, articles on textile design and tensile structures.... excited to start more pieces that involve maps...

The last time I was at the bargain barn I found a trench coat by Michael Kors. No stains, the tan sort of ‘closet staple’ that every woman should own that they always talk about in magazines. When I bought it I was thinking about myself as one of those women—u know, with a little black dress and all the other ‘classic pieces’ that someone has in their Louis Vuitton luggage set when they travel for a long weekend. I was obsessed with this packing list that Joan Didion wrote in White Album—that idea that you only have a small set of carefully selected garments and objects that limits what you can do and wear on your vacation in a glamorous and effortless (looking) way. There is something about the curation of things that gives them value.

Anyway the Michael Kors Trench, I put it on and its just not me. Silver buttons and really, as much as I’d like to imagine, maybe I’m not a girl who wears little black dresses. I’m ok with my closet looking more like a polka dot and floral vomit center. I do love a wooden hanger.

Now I’m in the process of selling this coat on eBay and its sort of a conceptual project to make something I found in a shit heap seem like a closet staple for the girl-on-the-go. I like DIY advertising. How could this idea become more palpable as art? Trash-to-spectacle. When I worked for Anne Wilson she was setting up a lecture series ‘trash to spectacle’ (a phrase I know ive stolen and re appropriated as a mantra) and I helped brainstorm possible speakers, people like shinique smith and another guy who made really amazing African masks out of running shoes, I forget his name. I think Glenn Adamson spoke. I’m still fascinated with the idea of trash, the forgotten things, becoming important, valued. Its that old Japanese idea of a thing actually having more value when it is used. The cracks of wear being the point of value. My housemate saves every plastic yogurt container she uses, which is something that really bothers me. Its like there is a spectrum of value that hovers over everything, and the subjectivity of it all pricks us—VALUE is so crazy to me. Preciousness. Because that’s sort of what art is.

{photos: michael kors trench (now on ebay all you buyers!!, joan didion literary babe keepin chic, shinique smith mitumba deity (2005) c/o the brooklyn museum}

ok-

thinking about how to highlight the material traces of making (the seams) on the mutant clothes. As you can see in the hanging dress piece and the mutant shirt on the wall (above), I used ink before the garments were epoxied and it ended up bleeding all over the clothes and not really looking how I wanted it. But i do really want to engage with ink or paint in some way to highlight the seems; I remember Schiff showing me old Japanese tea bowls with cracks mended with gold, I want the cracks, the seams of the garments to be showcased. i feel like that was what i was really going for in my map pieces from school, and then achieved it in a less direct and more formal way in my thesis. i think i am bent on using ink or paint to showcase the seams because of its direct link to drawing -- i want to make a drawing out of the labor enacted on the cloth.

I’ve been bargain barning like crazy and selling things at boutiques and its become a really fun way to make money while I don’t have a job. I love the concept of digging in a pile of crap and finding something that will become special if I deem it so. Its sort of like clothing gentrification. I’m getting a ton of etsy play too, which makes me wanna keep making wearable fashion objects to sell. I just don’t want it to distract me from sculpture, but somehow feed in. on a walk with my dad this morning, we talked a lot about the power of video and how to use a space in the most dramatic and important way that I can. It got me more excited about sculpture and I really want to project unraveling knitting onto bargain barn sweaters in a clothesline. It would be awesome if the show was really dimly lit and there were just little spotlights on certain pieces and then a projection.

tonight i'm going to this show at ben's project space-- 63 bluxome st. san francisco. the totem and the ocean.

To do:
- make a new fibrous stop animation (green mohair???)
- play piano and sing more, write a new instrumental song
- ink/acrylic seams on mutant clothes

{photos: my own mutant clothes, japanese tea bowl mended with gold from this site}

lately i've been having a hard time getting myself to work on the sculptures that i intend to bring to portland. i remember getting this way when i was working on my thesis-- finding myself becoming bored with a labor-heavy task i set out for myself. wracking my brain on ways to keep it interesting. feeling down on myself for procrastinating. i know that making art isn't always fun, but i wish i felt like what i was doing was more meaningful to me. i find it interesting that right now i am more interested in thrift shopping, looking at fashion blogs, working on etsy stuff... i think i am using clothes to distract me from sculpture, which is weird because my sculptures are essentially garments, just mutated and unfinished. after two largely unproductive days, last night i was brainstorming on ways i can keep this process fresh, keep myself excited, incorporate these 'distractions' into my work in some way, not be bored. thinking of what gets me really excited about being in the studio.
1. working towards a deadline shabang. (portland! i don't know what my problem is, i have a show coming up! hopefully when i get up there and am in the space, the excitement will return.)
2. getting feedback and talking about my work with people that are into it and into ME. (cara commented a few posts back, really fodderous and excited, my fave unofficial professor. and portland, well, that will be just crit central.)
3. clothes, stories, music (singing/piano), sunshine. bingo.

so i've got all these epoxied printed doppleganger (thanks cameron for title idea) sculptures lying and hanging around here. i have little interest in working on them right now, especially because the stiffer they get i am afraid about how much i can fit into my car on the drive up. (ps. anyone in the bay area wanna come to portland?) so i've been stiffening soft things to make them hard. mutating old clothes to be material, handcrafted, sloppy beings. i do want to stiffen some seam drawings but i sort of want to wait until i get to portland to do this because again, after the epoxy goes on, fabric can actually break and i think it will just be easier to bring them as seams. i am excited by this body of work at times, its hollowness, materiality-- i feel like this stuff is more bulky and solid than any work ive done before. cara mentioned in her comment about how she liked my using the hangers to 'bookend' the pieces, tying them back to their origin as clothing and highlighting the tension between clothing and sculpture. thats what it has become in my life, a real tension. my goal is to make it more fluid. she suggested a hanger at both ends of the dopplegangers to relate two ends to each other. she's right, when ever i see the camo one i laugh a little, it does look like a creepy caterpillar. she also pointed out all the layers of process i am enacting on these things, which is something i am trying to be more explicit about.

i have been thinking a lot about that video idea i had a few posts back, about making an 'album' amount of instrumental songs/videos that are tied together. i really want a reason to be composing music seriously. and i do find making videos quite rewarding and meaningful. i had a revelation about the connection between playing repetitive music on the piano and knitting. its almost the same sort of repetitive meditative hand to object process, yet with knitting you are left with a material trace and unless you record the piano, you are left with nothing. in this album of songs/vids, what comes first, what births the thing, a song, or an image?should there be video in my portland show? or should i set boundaries and wait until my san francisco show when i'll have more time to do the full album? i don't really 

like setting boundaries as to medium, and i still have about a month until my actually opening in portland (i could make a few videos if i decided to, but that takes deciding). one thing that i am really interested in is writing stories from the perspective of a garment, in its journey into becoming (making) and through its life, for example hanging in barneys new york and then ending up in a thrift store in california and then being made into paper pulp or something. i thought maybe i could read the stories over the videos. i also had the idea while i was swimming today that it would be neat to project onto garments themselves as if i was imbuing them with anarchic making energy. maybe they are on a clothes line?(i found this picture awhile back of giraffes projected onto a clothes line and i think about it a lot) . i want to make something that is at once familiar to people in form and also strange and thought provoking. Knitting is strange yet familiar. We are estranged from the simple process. We don’t know the real story of how an object comes into being. Maybe we don’t think about it when it presents itself to us. we can only make it up. i need to incorporate my bargain barning more (i have been going to the bargain barn and then selling things i find to vintage boutiques in the bay area, and this whole value shifting process is very interesting to me)-- the process of gathering, selling, peeking into objects inhering monetary value after having it and then not having it for a while. the idea that clothes are merely material stitched together, yet what store they hang in (or in the case of the b barn, pile in) determines their value, its a phenomenon that is endlessly fascinating. i really like the idea of imaging stories of the lives of these garments, from pristine and fancy to garbage. from trash to spectacle and back. its almost like the clothes are portalsinto these imagined worlds. the imagery in the videos could be portals into their story, into the real truth of happenings. My voice is a narrator. and then there are the making processes of how they come into existence in the first place, maybe in a sweat shop in india in 1993 or someones grandma's singer machine... then there is the question-- when does a garment come to life? is it when the first needle goes in? or are they alive when they are sheered from a sheep and are fibers raw on the spinning room floor? or silk worms cocoons being spun in little green houses in greece? is it the construction of a person that gives them life?so i've got all these ideas. but as for a show, what do we see?

{photos: dress from my etsy, my dopplegangers (in progress), photo from my friend elyse's tumblr, unknown photo source, skirt photo from face hunter}