unmakings

Here is the first piece I've been working on in my new place (still in process). Its a wall sculpture made from knitted plastic fluorescent trail marking tape and commercial patterns carried out to their intended forms. The baby dress is a combination of pattern and found clothing. I'm experimenting in adding things together, pulling the forms out of the wall, trying to balance abstract form with garment, construction materials with clothing materials. While making the little baby dress I augmented the pattern to fit the found baby dress, and marked every change heavily with charcoal. I want to experiment more with drawing with charcoal onto the forms, some lines indicating my own planning and marking, some more as surface design, like polka dots or stripes. I want to add interfacing and padding and other materials like plaster and glue. Possibly more found clothing embedded, like a real belt through pattern belt loops. I was also experimenting with the idea of plastic shopping bags encasing a garment messing with our idea of its value, also plastic drycleaner bags and those wire/paper hangers they give you at the dry cleaners, adding to the idea of value as 'dry clean only' (i think is a total sham) is for clothing most often of higher value-- a garment in a dry cleaner bag is often more precious and preserved than one out of the bag.

Since my family's old house is currently being devoured by nature, my dad is letting me take over a few rooms of the old house to make an art installation in september. I'm going to go home for a week or so and just pretend I'm in a woodland residency. The rooms in that house are mostly made of large windows looking out onto redwood forest. My idea for the installation as of now is that I want to take a mass of land maps and aerial imagery and sew them together along roads and highways and other lines indicated in the maps. Possibly if some of the maps are of california, the places on the map where the installation's location is, Davenport, will have a string radiating out. I was imagining also including a video in the installation that has to do with the sewing process of the maps, coupled with found footage of driving, found footage of flying over land in a plane. Its all still a big idea cloud, but its exciting to be working towards another big installation and to know that there will be a time in the not so distant future where I can be alone with myself and my thoughts. So I think my goals artistically for the summer are to work on a few discrete sculptures that all toy with similar materials and themes -- working with the maps, patterns, quilts, and construction materials, and then to simultaneously work on this new video and mass of map material for the installation. yeyYEEEEEEy!!!