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}

this is a video i just finished in collaboration with kira akerman. we used some videos from my thesis and one (the middle of the series) was a piece i didn't end up using in my thesis series, because it is not tailored to the wall but filmed from above, a little crocheted creature. kira wrote a poem that i read based on the 3 videos, and titled them time; space, loneliness; love. we put some music zoe and i made long long ago to the films and i tinkered in final cut to get it all going. all the collaboration happened just over the internet, not even a phone conversation. we are applying to an art show in athens, georgia. i hope we get it! making this, i remembered how i kinda like making videos! i think i forgot this, and only remembered the parts i didn't like about the process. one thing i really liked about making it was its relation, in the way that user-friendly computer programs now seem to have, a relation to handmade. garage band and hole in my computer to record my voice, vimeo and g chat to share thoughts, photoshop text for the title pages. it all seemed very janky and hand done, a sort of new generation of handmade, lo fi. i also liked how there seemed to be an end in sight to this video. kira had made a recipe and i followed it, straying when i felt i needed to, but there was a script i was following and i ended up staying up really late working on it because i could foresee 'finishing.'

that is something that is NOT happening with the sculptural work i've been doing in the studio. everything is a work-in-progress-- i am so into the idea of 'living with' these things i am making long enough for them to evolve. its like i think they will tell me when they are done. like the time spent waiting for them to congeal will imbue them with more....more of something. i talked to travis last night and today about my show in portland at appendix, and we set a date for my show, feb 25, a friday. it does feel good to know exactly when the show is, as a deadline for all this stuff i'm working on. and i am going up there 3 weeks prior to the show to see the show before mine, and also to be able to get as much crit/residency-like time there as i can. while im not using that as an excuse to slack off, i am hoping that a change of scenery and input from zach and travis (and others there) will help edit and evolve the work. Right now i see the show divided among 5 catagories/pieces.

1. camo printed tankini piece

2. sorry/sari printed piece

3. tent piece

4. seam drawings series (walls, possibly hanging installation?)

5. mutant clothes series

i've begun to stiffen things with epoxy resin-- so far i've done part of the camo tankini piece and one of the 'mutant' shirts. its surprisingly fun and i always feel like i'm really 'making art' when i'm using materials that involve messiness and/or the use of 'studio clothes' or rubber gloves. it just takes a while to get myself to want to engage in new processes; i'm very tied to my sewing machine and my snips.

i've been having stressful dreams, although my waking life is very calm and the weather here is so amazing for january. i kinda wanna stay up really late tonight working on my sari/sorry piece (out of an indian sari i found at a salvation army in philadelphia, more blogging on this to come). i miss school, where late night studio time is such a group effort. i wish i had studio buddies here, aside from patches, my cat. grad school?