unmakings

Skin exploration: Using obvious sculpture materials. Trying to transform them into something else. So what if its conventional material? The most obvious thing, showing that means something. Urge to be not so obvious, but when is obvious good? Wire, skin. You can tell exactly what I did. It is the thing it is, you start thinking about my process. The work is to reveal my labor, others’ labor. The point where it goes from obvious to formal. Pedantic sewing lesson becomes exposing labor. Both with the patterns and the knitting projected onto a surface, I’m x-raying the surface. For example the pattern would be an x-ray of the clothes because its an index of the labor that went into the clothes. The patterns are also a template, an x-ray, an understructure. In reference to the George Baker lecture—the negative is a template / stencil / understructure for a final piece. To extend the thinking of the negative beyond the discourse of photography.

Relationship between my work and contemporary fashion and architecture: Frank Geary, organic-looking, boulders, rocks, geological forms. My knowledge of making is located in clothing, and I’m super-imposing what I know over what I don’t. Clothing as an architecture for body, houses as clothing, etc. 

{California: Stage Set for John Jasperse}

John Jasperse’s sets. ‘California.’ 
Formal congruence to my work, but also it’s a immersive set for a dance piece, it keeps falling apart. A formless thing that continues to lose its form.

Following the patterns. Skin, embodiment, my own skin, envelope, body architecture. Patterns are made so that people can make their own clothes, connotation of hobby craft. The instructions are part of it. Located in history, dated, each have an era. Typography changes with the times. Dressmaking, clothing construction/fabrication/skills. Working collaboratively in theater and film. Working with choreographer. Making an environment that the performer manipulates, the set has movable parts that the performer articulates. Feeling a little limited by just clothing—interested in clothing, extending beyond the clothing to the history, the life of the thing. Beyond an aesthetic object, static sculpture. The history of fashion and how it works, costumes, set, video. Using the knowledge that I have already. I don’t want to be defined just by sculpture. Video to make something time-based. Installation to make something immersive, performative. Live element. Using the opportunity of the xmpl, the community of dancers, etc. Make mistakes. Fictitious props, costumes, environment. Pelt as a costume, to give it life again.

The grid. Weavings are grid. Different things happening simultaneously. Mapping is grid-like, and the ideal highway is a straight line. But I’ve stitched it in such a way that pushing against the very idea of a grid. The grid is an alibi of reason, rationality, mapability.  Avails itself of the logic of the weaving, stitches, adhering line to line, but also wants to go against that. With the patterns, I follow and missfollow the directions, I try to attach two things that don’t fit together. I’m interested when the grid-like or ordered thing falls apart. In the pelt piece I was trying to put order into something that had originally not been flat, and through making it I realized I had to insert darts into places that asked me to create volume.

{Dance Works III: Merce Cunningham / Rei Kawakubo, 1997}

Embodiment in relationship to my process. Body and skin – the separation of the skin from the body, the sense of inhabiting the body. Feeling yourself in your own skin. Violence, extrication as a tone/feel. Flaying. Clothing as a wall between the body and the world, an armature.

Comme des garcons. The Merse Cunningham dance piece ’97 collection. Issey Miyake, interested in fashion that fucks with fashion. Interested in commodity fetishism and absence of labor, but not conventional fashion.

When there is text on something, you want to read it. Is that bad? When do you stop reading it? A map is a map, or the seams of a shirt, it is obvious, but that’s ok. Audience interaction, something used. Wear it and perform something. An installation becomes a set. The work of Spartacus Chetwynd. 

{Spartacus Chetwynd at the New Museum, October 2011}

{Spartacus Chetwynd, The Snail Race (2008), Performance at Galleria Massimo De Carlo}

{Hussein chalayan, "Afterwords" 2000}

Working towards a larger installation in smaller components

Using a system dictating the form. Beginning with a system and then undo the system when I get frustrated. Riding a line between following rules/systems and using whims. Trying to decide when to do what. Clothing patterns and maps, highways as sewing lines. Where clothing intersects architecture. Clothing as an extension of the body. Fashion and Skin. Hussein chalayan, dada fashion, Hussein chalayan dress as furniture and clothing. 
Maison Martin Margiela’s clothing based on Barbie so the buttons were huge. Startling shift in scale. A fashion construct and an architectural construct.

Using loaded materials that already have meaning, and then obscuring the system, turning inside out what I began with.

Confused is a good place to be. If I knew exactly what I was doing, I’d be in the wrong place, where would the discovery be?

Maps, pelt, patterns.

Gathering, thrifting.

Plastination of bodies/anatomy. Borderline of grotesque and art.

Projecting weaving onto bricks. Brick by brick, interdependent strings, interdependent frames. Building it up from nothing, then deconstructing. Reversing the temporal process. By projecting onto a wall, it adds the metaphor to the building, like the building itself is being re-made. Over-laid but time displaced. Something is building up while something is breaking down. Color filter. Try this.

Knitting is a dynamical system—a force on one place effects another, its an interconnected network. Mathematical theories, knots, Scott snibbe’s boundary functions.

Irvine physics prof Michael D . dynamical networks, bubbles, slip and slide and fit. Networks and meshworks, maps and knitting. Knitting videos as drawings. Joke: frayed knot / ‘fraid not. Asymmetrical meshwork. Computer graphics, self-evolving roadmap, model of a growing city. Like game of thrones intro: mechanical clock that becomes a city, to orient you in the fantasy world. Wanting to re-make my version of this. Calvino’s invisible cities. Fractal geometry—the veins of a leaf as it grows, the ways city grows, highways to roads, to tiny alleyways. Veins to the lungs. Not like fractal poster art. A theory of detail across scale. These kinds of laws can be applied to lungs, to deltas, to tree branches. Putting an order onto nature.

In clothing, flat shapes becoming 3D. Geometry. Meshworks, networks, tensions. Translations from 2 D to 3D, like map projections.

{Meret Oppenheim's fur lined teacup Breakfast in Fur, 1936 }

{Nancy Grossman's Head 1968}

Pelt: Followed what it wanted me to do, the inside is where you can see where I attached. Because it wasn’t flat to begin 
with, it was curved around a round thing, I had to put darts in it to stretch it open. The chicken wire helped me gain control of the form it became, then I realized there was all these idiosyncrasies to the shape it became dictated by the shape it had been. Chicken wire makes it defy gravity, it has a skeleton. What does it do? Putting an order on something without order, using the chicken wire as a mapping tool. Maybe the chicken wire is not the right armature. A more drawing-like wire. Tomato stand. Some sort of collision and the what the shape it is, don’t want to be just what it was… a landscape? It used to be walking around. What if I turned the deer inside out? What is inside and what is outside? Like a flayed skin. Stripping your way down to the tendons, muscles, etc. The most disturbing thing is not the furry side. That is the side you already know. Lacan talking about a fur glove being inside out. Fur-lined tea cup. meret Oppenheim. 
Basketball helmet: related to leather, sad, deflated, Mexican wrestling mask. Nancy Grossman’s work. 
Armatures. Old wooden hat forms. Just working on the head. Its very focused, not the whole body, doing everything you can with an oval with orifices. The zipper. Working out little technical ideas. Small isn’t less, when you have to go up close there is more to see.