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 portals
into 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?
i am always collecting jpgs (i separate them by month) on my computer sort of like a perpetual virtual mood board like fashion designers have. this month's collection so far has a very distinct Color palette, army greens and muddy wine red, mostly. i am thinking of dying some of my mutant clothes and seam drawings so that my portland show reflects this 'color way.' dye seems like a way to change and bite into the materials and revamp them, take them farther from bargain barn loot and clothing cast offs. but is it important that they retain their old color personalities?
I spent today coating my mutant clothes, sari piece and camo piece in epoxy to stiffen them. they look really good and creepy empty. yesterday my family and i went to the city to look at art and some of the things i was really responding to were work that had a very tangible feeling of the artist's handling the work, like i could very visually imagine their process and it was clear they just loved the hand to material experience. (ei. robert brady, manuel neri)
i know that sort of thing just sort of comes out of art when the artist engages in that hands-on experience with it, but i was thinking of ways that my work could feel more like that to people. i already let threads hang and leave seams raw, but what are other ways to show that trace of making and show my revelatory process to people? through my recent experiences with epoxy, i am realizing that i really feel like i am 'making art' when i am engaging in materials that are messy. i had the idea of further stiffening the mutant clothes with something visibily messy like plaster. What if I covered some of the mutant clothes (after epoxy) in plaster?
i also just came across this french artist named emilie faif, who i do find a little too cutesie to be fully inspired by but she uses clothing and fabric in her work and i found this one installation she did involving the pattern pieces to a pair of jeans all laid flat out on the wall.I've been reading one of andrea zittel's diaries, and am very inspired by the way she creates systems and rules that govern her life, and in the diary her life seems so fluidly her art, and all her musings are included, shared with others. i almost feel like blogging is a way to do this, to let people in to what i am thinking (almost) every day even if no one is actually reading. I feel like I am effectively achieving blurring the distinction between my own clothes and clothing i use in my work, but i wonder how i could further embed my systems into my life. or do i even want to?
i have been getting a lot of compliments on the film i did with kira, especially regarding the interaction with my animations and the music i composed. since i have been wanting to do more composing, and have been tinkering a little, i was thinking about making a big goal out of it. i was thinking about the san francisco show at ben's space, and maybe for that show i would do a whole 'album' like series of animations, each with its own customized score. and then it could be a real venue for some sort of performance, music... maybe even some movement... i was really getting excited while i was swimming today thinking about it. i do feel like those films are unique and a good way for me to bridge my music and my art together, and it really feels like 'me' behind it all, i really get that sense of self expression when i show them to people. i think i really need to consider continuing with them.
{photos: from top to bottom, left to right, comme des garcons fw09, jean yves lemoigne, don't know (from tumblr), lisa kehoe a public loo in norway, manuel neri standing figure (1982), robert brady new work (2010), my own dopplegangers and mutants (in progress), emilie faif patron/ vetement isabel marant (2010)}
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.
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?
into 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?
